SpaceX chief Elon Musk has spoke of his desire to make Falcon 9 the first fully reusable launch vehicle, which he would \u201clove\u201d to include a flyback first stage. Musk also noted he is aiming for Falcon 9 to launch in under 60 minutes from the moment they leave their hangers.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Musk was speaking to an audience at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting a few days ago, in a speech entitled \u201cThe Future of Space Launch: Where We\u2019re Going and How to Get There.\u201d<\/p>\n
SpaceX is coming off the back of an encouraging conclusion to 2008, with the successful Flight 4 of their Falcon I launch vehicle, and progress towards the 2009 flight of their Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Space X also won 46 percent of NASA\u2019s $.3.5 billion dollar Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract.<\/p>\n
\u201c2008 was a pretty busy year for SpaceX,\u201d said Musk, using videos and slides ahead of a Q&A session. \u201cWe finally got into orbit and we\u2019ve completed most of our development of our Falcon 9 schedule \u2013 which to give you a comparison; Falcon I can carry half a ton payload to orbit and Falcon 9 can carry 11 tons. It\u2019s a pretty big step up in scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The Falcon 9 vehicle will make its debut launch from Cape Canaveral, lifting off from a pad that was formerly used for the Titan 4 launch vehicles. Although it will take a number of flights, Musk has a goal of being able to roll out the F9, erect at the pad, tank, complete checkouts of the vehicle and launch in under 60 minutes. (Image left: SpaceX Falcon 9 Manned)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Falcon 9 tanks are all friction stir weld \u2013 and the F9 is largest fully friction stir welded structure in the world. The 180 feet long vehicle is assembled horizontally and the rolls out to the pad to be placed vertical for launch,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the goals I have for the Falcon 9 \u2013 which will take us many launches to achieve \u2013 is to have the vehicle out of the hanger and into the air in under 60 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Space Shuttle models (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n The launch date for Falcon 9\u2019s debut remains fluid, although the vehicle itself is not the determining factor in trying to make a summer launch, claims Musk.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hoping for a summer launch of the Falcon 9, though I predict that is pending (based on) the development of its payload.\u201d<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s Orion lost nominal land landing capabilities via one of its numerous mass saving exercises \u2013 causes by performance shortfalls with the Ares I launch vehicle.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no major difference in appearance between the manned and unmanned version of Falcon 9, apart from the Launch Escape Tower (and the Dragon spacecraft for human passengers),\u201d Musk noted.<\/p>\n \u201cDragon is designed for water landing, but could go to land landing later via airbags or a pneumatic piston that pulls on the chute. With that capability you can land almost anywhere, but currently the nominal landing site is just off the coast of California.\u201d<\/p>\n A large part of the speech \u2013 the audio (50 minutes) and over 50 slides from the presentation are available on L2\u2019s SpaceX subsection (only click if you are a L2 member) \u2013 was dedicated towards SpaceX\u2019s full reusability ambitions, with hints towards using Falcon 1 as a test bed for \u201cbeefing up\u201d protection on the stages to allow for reuse, before the full capability is added to the Falcon 9.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big thing that has to happen in space transportation is reusability. People sometimes use the Space Shuttle as an example, and say well gee, the Space Shuttle is so expensive and that was intended to be mostly reusable and doesn\u2019t that prove that reusability is a bad idea? I think that it\u2019s really silly to extrapolate on a single data point.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at any other mode of transportation like a bike or a horse, how many people would use that mode of transportation if it wasn\u2019t reusable?<\/p>\n \u201cEven if you make the vehicle very efficient, and create the most optimal trajectory, you are still only getting two to three percent of your launch mass to orbit.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to make recovery systems robust enough to withstand re-entry and that is a very difficult problem \u2013 no one has really solved that problem yet. At SpaceX we\u2019re trying to make the first stage reusable.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Falcon I\u2019s fourth launch, the first stage got cooked, so we\u2019re going to beef up the Thermal Protection System (TPS). By flight six we think it\u2019s highly likely we\u2019ll recover the first stage, and when we get it back we\u2019ll see what survived through re-entry, and what got fried, and carry on with the process.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s just to make the first stage reusable, it\u2019ll be even harder with the second stage \u2013 which has got to have a full heatshield, it\u2019ll have to have deorbit propulsion and communication.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk also spoke about his wish to enable the first stage with flyback capability, but added that he would require a large sum of cash to achieve that goal.<\/p>\n \u201cAny pound you use for reusability and re-entry (on the second stage) is a pound subtracted directly from payload, whereas first stage it\u2019s a five to one ratio. This is a problem we\u2019re trying to solve incrementally, but most exciting thing I\u2019ve love to do is a flyback first stage. We\u2019re just missing the billion dollars of capital it would take to try to do that.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, the goal for Falcon 9 is that it ends up being the first fully-reusable launch vehicle.\u201d (Image Left: Inside Dragon capsule during ascent and Falcon 9 injecting Dragon into orbit).<\/p>\n Part 2 of Elon\u2019s speech will follow in the coming days, in which he speaks on SpaceX\u2019s association with NASA, the colonization of Mars, downstream satellite contracts, how suborbital is \u201clittle league\u201d, and how he \u201cwishes to affect the world in a positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SpaceX chief Elon Musk has spoke of his desire to make Falcon 9 the first fully reusable launch vehicle, which he would \u201clove\u201d to include a flyback first stage. Musk also noted he is aiming for Falcon 9 to launch in under 60 minutes from the moment they leave their hangers. Musk was speaking to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1395,8993,479,316],"class_list":["post-41217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-dragon","tag-falcon-1","tag-falcon-9","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/a34.jpg\")
Musk went on to speak about the Dragon capsule that will fly with the manned version of the Falcon 9, noting that SpaceX are looking to enable the vehicle to land anywhere in the world, by adding land landing capability. (Image Left: SpaceX Dragon splashdown).<\/p>\nSee Also<\/h4>\n
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\u201cBut that\u2019s what SpaceX is aspiring to try and make this work, and I think if we show some progress and success, it would inspire other companies and other countries to try it as well.<\/p>\n