Space Rocket Carrier Landing

[Guest]

All right not on a carrier but rather on a barge  . Amazing however when you consider that the barge is moving up and down with the wave movement.. http://www.spacex.com/news/2016/05/27/thaicom-8-mission-photos

SpaceX makes fourth successful rocket landing
by Staff Writers
Miami (AFP) May 27, 2016

SpaceX launched an Asian communications satellite into a distant orbit Friday and for the fourth time managed to recover the rocket that did the work.

Under blue skies dotted with clouds, the shiny white Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 5:40 pm (2140 GMT) carrying the Thaicom 8 satellite.

The rocket returned to Earth about 10 minutes later, firing its engines and maneuvering with its fins to an upright position on a powered barge, known as a drone ship, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean some 420 miles (680 kilometers) off the Florida coast.

SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in cheers as the rocket touched down.

At first, the live webcast cut out briefly as the rocket neared the drone ship, then footage returned, showing the scorched but intact rocket standing straight and appearing steady.

"Rocket landing speed was close to design max," said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Twitter, noting that there was some "back and forth motion."

"Prob ok, but some risk of tipping," he added.

Musk wants to revolutionize the launch industry by making rocket components reusable, much the same way as commercial airplanes.

Currently, expensive rocket parts are jettisoned into the ocean after each launch.

SpaceX has managed to successfully land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets three times before -- twice on water and once on land.

This is the second time SpaceX has landed on the ocean platform after a launch to geostationary transfer orbit, which is much further than the low-Earth orbit altitude at which the International Space Station circles the globe.

The high speed and heat involved with the rocket's return make a steady touchdown more challenging than a low-Earth orbit launch.

The primary mission of the lauch was also a success.

The Thaicom 8 satellite, which weighs about 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms) was deployed as planned.

Built by Orbital ATK, the satellite will provide broadcast and data services to South Asia and Southeast Asia for a period of 15 years.

[Guest]

Now we may see the first use of a "recycled" first stage.

SpaceX poised to launch first recycled rocket By Kerry SHERIDAN Miami (AFP) March 30, 2017 SpaceX is poised to launch its first recycled rocket on Thursday, using a booster that sent food and supplies to the astronauts living at the International Space Station in April. The goal of the launch, scheduled for 6:27 pm (2227 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, is to send a communications satellite for Luxembourg-based company SES into a distant orbit.   Standing tall at the NASA launchpad, the white Falcon 9 rocket contains a tall, column-like portion known as the first stage, or booster, that propelled the unmanned Dragon cargo ship to space last year, then returned to an upright landing on an ocean platform.   SpaceX, the California-based company headed by internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, has for years been honing the technology of powering its boosters back to careful Earth landings on solid ground and in the water.   So far it has successfully landed eight -- five on so-called "drone ships" floating in the ocean, and three on land.   The goal, Musk has said, is to make rocket parts just as reusable as cars, planes or bicycles.   Currently, millions of dollars worth of rocket parts are jettisoned after each launch.   SpaceX officials have said that reusing hardware could slash costs -- with each Falcon 9 launch costing over $61 million -- by about 30 percent.   While generating plenty of buzz, the novel process still raises concerns for both customers and SpaceX.   They include "worries about it failing, insurance implications, retrofitting turnaround, building up a critical mass of reused first stages in the warehouse," said the global investment banking firm Jefferies International in an April report.   "But the direction of travel is clear."   SpaceX competitor Blue Origin, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has also successfully landed its New Shepard booster after launch, by powering its engines to guide it down for a controlled, upright landing.   "Reusability allows us to fly the system again and again," said a statement on Blue Origin's website.   "With each flight, we'll continuously improve the affordability of space exploration and research, opening space for all."   - 'Flight-proven' -   As for the cost of Thursday's launch, Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer at SES, has declined to say publicly the exact amount.   However, he dismissed "naysayers" this week and stressed the historic nature of the launch on what he has described as a "flight-proven" rocket.   "I think we are on the edge of quite a significant bit of history here," he told a press conference.   "Now we are here to be the first ever mission to fly on a pre-flown booster," he said.   "This is obviously hugely exciting."   When the mission was announced in August, Halliwell said the deal "illustrates the faith we have in (SpaceX's) technical and operational expertise."   The SES-10 satellite will be sent to a geostationary orbit, flying as high as 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above the Earth before maneuvering into its designated orbit.   The satellite aims to expand television, internet and mobile connections across Latin America.   ksh/rob/dw   AMAZON.COM   JEFFERIES GROUP  Article Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/SpaceX_poised_to_launch_first_recycled_rocket_999.html

[Moon The Loon]

Wow. Pilotless airplanes a thing of the very near future.

It will start on freight runs across the Atlantic and follow the same introduction practices as RVSM. Up until recently, I thought within the next 50 years but now feel it will be widespread in the next 20 years.

All based on independent industry R&D such as SpaceX and so many other RPV developers are conducting.

Good time to retire!!!!!

[Guest]

An update re their future plans for recycling. 

Elon Musk Plans Rapid Shift To ‘Flight-proven’ Falcon 9s

Apr 4, 2017Frank Morring, Jr. | Aviation Week & Space Technology

 

Elon Musk hopes to refly a half-dozen Falcon 9 first-stages this year and twice as many in 2018, as his SpaceX launch-services company pursues its goal to achieve “a huge revolution in spaceflight.”

Almost overlooked in the company’s spectacular first reflight of a Falcon 9 March 31 was the parachute return of at least half of the $6 million payload fairing that covered the SES-10 communications satellite on the historic launch. The fairing was guided to a point on the ocean with its own thruster set and a steerable chute, and Musk says SpaceX may try a “Hail Mary” attempt to recover the launcher’s upper stage at some point as well.

The goal is to cut the cost of space launch by a factor of 100 and perhaps much more. But two launch failures and countless delays have taught Musk that spaceflight truly is hard, and he concedes the enthusiasm generated by the first reflight is tempered by the need to recover the internal funds spent to get to that point.

SPACEX ROCKET REUSE PLAN

Refly first stages up to 10 times with no refurbishment

And as many as 100 times with moderate refurbishment

Eight flown boosters in inventory, plus the one flown twice

“Nobody was paying us for reusability; it had to be on our own dime,” Musk says. “It’s probably at least $1 billion that we’ve spent developing this. It will take us a while to pay that off.”

That will mean getting the flight rate up to the point that SpaceX can offer a discount to customers willing to entrust their payloads to a used rocket, and still retire the development costs. Musk told reporters at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), where the reflight originated on the same pad used by Apollo crews, that SpaceX has plans to refly first stages as many as 10 times with no refurbishment and to go as often as 100 times with the same booster using only “moderate” refurbishment.

“There are, I think, three or four others who have signed up on a contingency basis, like, ‘if this one works, sure,’” Musk says. “I think probably we’ll see more of those customers being willing.”

The company has eight flown boosters in its inventory, plus the one flown twice. Musk says he will offer that one to the government as a historic artifact, and use two more as side-mounted boosters for the first flight of the upcoming Falcon Heavy, with a modified core stage, later this year. All three stages are planned for recovery and reuse for future savings, he says.

 

Reused Falcon 9 lifts off from Launch Complex 39A with the STS-10 communications satellite on board. Credit SpaceX

“If the cost of the rocket is, say, $60 million, we’re not reusing the whole thing, but assuming the fairing reuse works out, and as we optimize the cost of reuse of the booster, we’re really looking at maybe three-quarters of the rocket dropping by an order of magnitude, and maybe more.”

Liftoff of the Falcon 9 from KSC’s Launch Complex 39A with the SES-10 satellite on board came at 6:27 p.m. EDT on March 31, the beginning of its launch window. The Falcon 9 first-stage’s nine Merlin engines burned for about 2 min. 38 sec. before shutting down, and the second-stage’s single Merlin ignited 8 sec. later. The first stage reignited for its reentry burn 6 min. 19 sec. after liftoff, and the stage touched down on the downrange robotic barge dubbed “Of Course I Still Love You” 2 min. 13 sec. after that.

After recovering the stage for the first time following a space station resupply mission in April 2016, SpaceX trucked it back to its plant in Hawthorne, California, for inspection and refurbishment. Engineers tested it at the company’s facility in Texas before it was shipped back to Florida for relaunch.

Musk says SpaceX will inspect and refurbish boosters at facilities already acquired near its launchpads in the future. In addition to Pad 39A, which it has leased from NASA and modified to handle the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and the upcoming Crew Dragon that will take astronauts to the International Space Station, the company also is completing repairs to the launch facility on nearby Cape Canaveral AFS that was badly damaged in an on-pad explosion of a Falcon 9 upper stage last year (AW&ST Jan. 23-Feb. 5, p. 27).

Blue Origin, which is developing a launch complex at Cape Canaveral for its planned New Glenn reusable orbital booster, also will refurbish its first stages near the launch site, and manufacture new stages there as well, also with the aim of achieving efficiency on the turnaround.

The company, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has demonstrated it can fly its suborbital New Shepard booster five times without removing the single engine between flights, but it still took weeks between flights to certify the vehicle ready for each reflight.

That need to recertify a reusable vehicle for flight prevented NASA from achieving its intended “space truck” operability with the reusable space shuttle, which required extensive and expensive refurbishing after each mission, even when it was able to fly back to KSC for refurbishment.

Dan Dumbacher, professor of engineering practice of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University and former deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA, spent much of his career working on reusable spaceflight. He cautions that operational reusability will not come easy for any of the private launch service providers.

“[The] shuttle was a launch vehicle operating at the edges of the margin, at the edges of the capability of the hardware given the environment that it had to operate in,” Dumbacher says. “When you design a launch vehicle, you need to provide yourself some margin. The hardware has to be able to operate in the operating environments, and the margin that you must have to be able to minimize the cost of going from flight to flight is a very key element in the engineering.”

Musk says SpaceX continues to refine its design to meet the difficulties of sending hardware into space and bringing it back to the surface. On the March 31 reflight, for example, the grid fins that guide the first stage back through the atmosphere caught fire. The vehicle landed before the fins—made of aluminum covered with a thermal protection system—failed structurally, but future fins will be made of forged titanium to gain more margin, he says.

That is exactly the type of work that went on throughout the shuttle program, and what SpaceX, Blue Origin and other companies that enter the reusable-launch arena must do, says Dumbacher.

“They just have to look at every single element of cost, and figure out what’s the most efficient way to do it,” Dumbacher says. “Frankly, that’s the beauty of this competition. You don’t have it being dictated by anybody. You’ve got business people on a day-to-day basis figuring out how they meet the customer’s needs, get the revenue up and at the same time minimize their cost.”

Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer of Luxembourg-based SES, says his company is considering using reflown boosters on two more SpaceX launches, and suggests that the March 31 success has SpaceX’s competitors “quaking in their boots.”

“We worked very, very closely with SpaceX, and that’s probably really why we’ve done more of these types of missions with SpaceX than anybody else,” he says. “We were first with Proton, but with SpaceX we have a certain transparency, and we have a certain depth of relationship, and also access to engineering specifics through our U.S. citizens.”

Following the successful first-stage landing, the Falcon 9 upper stage took its payload to geostationary transit orbit, with one restart of the 205,500-vacuum-lb.-thrust engine for about a 53-sec. burn. The spacecraft separated from the upper stage as planned a little more than 32 min. after launch and achieved what Halliwell termed a “perfect” geostationary transfer orbit.

Based on the Airbus Eurostar E3000 bus, SES-10 carries 55 K_u-band transponder equivalents and delivers 13 kW of power at the beginning of its planned 15-year on-orbit service life. Weighing 5,300 kg (11,685 lb.) at launch, it will use solar electric propulsion for stationkeeping, backed up by a chemical propulsion system that is also used for initial orbit raising.

Destined for a slot at 67 deg. W. Long., SES-10 will replace two older SES spacecraft in the Simon Bolivar-2 network serving Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. It will also add service capability for all customers in Latin America, ranging from Mexico to the southern tip of Chile, according to SES.