Musk: SpaceX to Attempt Falcon 9 First Stage Water Landing | Hacker News Reader

Musk: SpaceX to Attempt Falcon 9 First Stage Water Landing

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83 pointssomeperson23 comments

Q. Can you provide more details on Dragon Version 2?

Musk: Significant upgrades, powerful side mounted thruster pods. Quite big windows for astronauts to see outside. Landing legs that pop out of the bottom. It look like kind of a real alien spaceship. Started with landing on water because it was the easiest thing to do and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. Now want to push the envelope on the technology.

Plan to unveil Dragon Version 2 later this year.

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Fuck. Yes.

Exciting times. By mid-next-year spacex might make space travel an order of magnitude cheaper ($60mio vs $200k, aka launch vehicle cost vs fuel cost). It will lead to a paradigm shift as to what can feasibly be sent to space. Who knows it might even lead to a satelite startup craze. All in hopefully only 1 1/2 years.. Go spacex!

It won't be just fuel cost - personnel, recertifying/rehabbing the reusable equipment, etc. Cheaper, but likely not $200k by a long shot.

Of course not. But those are the primary costs of launch. Coming to think of it, fuel costs are probably smaller than dev and personnel costs. Nonetheless, it'll be a magnitude smaller than current launch prices. A typical series A round should allow startups to launch their own vehicles which is currently completely out of reach..

Fuel is only something like 2 or 3% of the cost of a typical launch.

I think that's the OPs point -- recoverable gear could potentially make fuel a limiting factor. (Although I don't know if this is realistic: there must be a lot of personell and equipment involved with refitting and firing a rocket into orbit, even if the rocket itself is free.)

There are limits to how much stuff you can put into space and many of the more useful orbits are getting fairly saturated. However, cost is what prevents people from using most orbits so there is a lot of room up there.

First, the spatial safety margins given to satellites don't really depend on the volume of the craft, so enabling much cheaper per-kg-to-LEO can greatly increase the amount of stuff up there in the same number of crafts. Second, I'm sure there are all sorts of clever ways to dramatically increase what we can fit up there if it were useful. Cheaper lift costs make it both cheaper and more valuable to clear space junk, etc. The amount of raw space up there is massive, something like millions of cubic miles per satellite.

(Surface area of Earth is 200 million square miles, times an easily accessible LEO altitude range between 120 and 170 miles, gives 1 million cubic miles for each of the 8000 satellites, operational or otherwise, currently in orbit.)

It's not just the satilite's you need to worry about try and put 10x the crap into orbit and suddenly the 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km altitude becomes 3 million. (It's paint flakes etc.) Which dramatically increases the amount of shielding required to survive the sand blasting and further increasing tiny junk up there and eventually the required shielding may become untenable.

Now, at some point clearing space junk is going to be worthwhile, but I think we are still a long way from that point.

Thanks. My understanding is that the amount of space junk produced per satellite launched is purposefully much lower now than in the past.

If the safety margin doesn't depend on the size of the craft, I could conceivably see a single platform host a hundred modules from various different startups. So you'd only have one "satellite" in LEO, but it would have a hundred module slots rented out. You'd just have to pay to raise your module up to LEO and hooked up to it, for a 3 year lease, or something of that sort.

That's probably a startup idea in itself. The whole selling shovels in a gold rush, etc.

Cool, so they are not just trying for a first stage powered landing, that's the big ticket item but they also slipped a powered Dragon landing in there too - two of three stages closing in fast on reusable recovery. Wow.

    > Q. What was the problem with the thrusters on Dragon?
    > Musk: There was a "very tiny change"

Sounds like software development!

That is an interesting approach, basically assuming that the first stage is "lost" and try to land it. If you do land it win! if not, well you didn't need to anyway.

Does anyone know if the landing will be parachute assisted like the solid rocket boosters of the shuttle?

SpaceX tried parachute recovery of first stages with earlier launches. Apparently it trashed the stage pretty good every time, so that they consider it a failed technique. (They've never released photos of a recovered part, so far as I know, which I think is evidence of embarrassment.)

With their Grasshopper work, I expect they'll try to save the mass and effort involved with parachutes and just do propulsive recovery. (Parachutes are surprisingly hard, and adding a second system of any sort is probably more than twice the work--and raises the probability of failure.)

Bug fixing rockets in space!

Q. What was the problem with the thrusters on Dragon?

Musk: There was a “very tiny change” to three of the check valves on the oxidizer tank. Different from the previous ones that flew, and they got stuck. Was able to write some new software in real time that was uploaded with Dragon to increase pressure upstream from check valve and release it. The spacecraft version of the Heimlich maneuver. Once they got unstuck, they worked very well.

Had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was drifting. Worked with the Air Force to get higher powered dishes to communicate with Dragon and upload the software.

I wonder if they are contracting with Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos's space company). They've been focusing on powered return from the beginning of their program.

http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-o...

Cool about the fact that there's increase in cargo capacity by 60%, but doesn't the grasshopper project will eventually reduce capacity to something like 1/10? (Can't find the quote right now but I swore I seen something like this)

Are there any videos of this press conference ?

Does anyone know what "sequestration" means?

If you're living in the States, I'm guessing you've been living under a rock the last few months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_sequestration

Short summary: Dysfunctional Congress set up automatic harsh spending cuts to force compromise. Shockingly, they couldn't compromise, so they went into effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequester_(2013)

So cool - Agile Aerospace.

Does anyone know (or guess) where the first stage will splash down?

And when the first stage returns to dry land - where will it come down? Azores?

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