Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "SpaceX reusable launch system development program" in English language version.
hopeful that sometime in the next couple of years we'll be able to achieve full and rapid reusability of the first stage—which is about three-quarters of the cost of the rocket—and then with a future design architecture, achieve full reusability.
F9R (pronounced F-niner) shows a little leg. Design is a nested, telescoping piston w A frame... High pressure helium. Needs to be ultra light.
Expendable rockets, which many smart people have worked on in the past, get maybe 2% of liftoff mass to orbit -- really not a lot. Then, when they've tried reusability, it's resulted in negative payload, a 0 to 2% minus payload [laughs]. The trick is to figure out how to create a rocket that, if it were expendable, is so efficient in all of its systems that it would put 3% to 4% of its mass into orbit. On the other side, you have to be equally clever with the reusability elements such that the reusability penalty is no more than 2%, which would leave you with a net ideally of still 2% of usable load to orbit in a reusable scenario, if that makes sense. You have to pry those two things apart: Push up payload to orbit, push down the mass penalty for reusability -- and have enough left over to still do useful work.
The April 17 F9R Dev 1 flight, which lasted under 1 min., was the first vertical landing test of a production-representative recoverable Falcon 9 v1.1 first stage, while the April 18 cargo flight to the ISS was the first opportunity for SpaceX to evaluate the design of foldable landing legs and upgraded thrusters that control the stage during its initial descent.
The first successful "soft landing" of a Falcon 9 rocket happened in April of this year.
SpaceX exists to further [the vision of humans becoming multi-planetary] on several fronts: to develop the reusable rocket technology that would be needed to ferry large numbers of people, and large amounts of cargo, to Mars; ...
'The earliest Falcon 9 launches carried parachutes which were to have been used to recover the first stage. However, this was abandoned due to the stage disintegrating during reentry, before the parachutes could be deployed. Instead, SpaceX began to investigate using the stage's engines to make a powered descent and landing. Alongside this, an improved Falcon 9 vehicle, the Falcon 9 v1.1, was developed.'
At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment.
Musk: "in the upcoming flights [SpaceX will] gather data about the reentry experience of the upper stage. Previously, we had not put a lot of effort into gathering data from the upper stage after it does its disposal burn. We will monitoring at what altitude and speed the stage breaks up…" Collecting this data is not easy. Musk explained that "it's tricky because it comes in like a meteor. It's sort of like a ball of plasma. You can only broadcast diagonally backwards, so we will be looking to communicate, probably [with] the Iridium constellation, and try to transmit basic data about temperature, basic health of the stage, velocity, and altitude."
To space and back, in less than nine minutes? Hello, future.
F9R (pronounced F-niner) shows a little leg. Design is a nested, telescoping piston w A frame... High pressure helium. Needs to be ultra light.
Q. What is strategy on booster recover? Musk: Initial recovery test will be a water landing. First stage continue in ballistic arc and execute a velocity reduction burn before it enters atmosphere to lessen impact. Right before splashdown, will light up the engine again. Emphasizes that we don't expect success in the first several attempts. Hopefully next year with more experience and data, we should be able to return the first stage to the launch site and do a propulsion landing on land using legs. Q. Is there a flight identified for return to launch site of the booster? Musk: No. Will probably be the middle of next year.
much bigger [than Falcon 9], but I don't think we're quite ready to state the payload. We'll speak about that next year.
SpaceX's work with the F9R is part of an effort to develop fully and rapidly reusable launch systems, a key priority for the company. Such technology could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100.
SpaceX is using private capital to develop and demonstrate the Falcon 9 rocket's reusability. SpaceX has not disclosed how much the reusable rocket program will cost.
Musk said SpaceX made the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage reusable with entirely private funding, investing at least $1 billion in the effort...
SpaceX has constructed a half-acre concrete launch facility in McGregor, and the Grasshopper rocket is already standing on the pad, outfitted with four insect-like silver landing legs.
SES's contract with SpaceX called for the rocket to deploy SES 9 into a "sub-synchronous" transfer orbit with an apogee around 16,155 miles (26,000 kilometers) in altitude. Such an orbit would require SES 9 to consume its own fuel to reach a circular 22,300-mile-high perch, a trek that Halliwell said was supposed to last 93 days. The change [SpaceX offered] in the Falcon 9's launch profile will put SES 9 into an initial orbit with an apogee approximately 24,419 miles (39,300 kilometers) above Earth, a low point 180 miles (290 kilometers) up, and a track tilted about 28 degrees to the equator.
"Falcon 9 second stage will be upgraded to be like a mini-BFR Ship," Musk said. The BFR's upper stage is sometimes referred to as a "spaceship".
Shotwell said SpaceX plans to attempt second stage recoveries from the existing Falcon family is less to reuse them, and more to learn about reusability in preparation for the BFR's second stage.
A key upgrade to enable precision targeting of the Falcon 9 all the way to touchdown is the addition of four hypersonic grid fins placed in an X-wing configuration around the vehicle, stowed on ascent and deployed on reentry to control the stage's lift vector. Each fin moves independently for roll, pitch and yaw, and combined with the engine gimbaling, will allow for precision landing – first on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, and eventually on land.
The Falcon 9 first stage carries landing legs which will deploy after stage separation and allow for the rocket's soft return to Earth. The four legs are made of state-of-the-art carbon fiber with aluminum honeycomb. Placed symmetrically around the base of the rocket, they stow along the side of the vehicle during liftoff and later extend outward and down for landing.
The Falcon Heavy first stage center core and boosters each carry landing legs, which will land each core safely on Earth after takeoff. After the side boosters separate, the center engine in each will burn to control the booster's trajectory safely away from the rocket. The legs will then deploy as the boosters turn back to Earth, landing each softly on the ground. The center core will continue to fire until stage separation, after which its legs will deploy and land it back on Earth as well. The landing legs are made of state-of-the-art carbon fiber with aluminum honeycomb. The four legs stow along the sides of each core during liftoff and later extend outward and down for landing.
This mission is going to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit. Following stage separation, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship. Given this mission's unique GTO profile, a successful landing is not expected.
[Falcon 9 v1.1] vehicle has thirty percent more performance than what we put on the web and that extra performance is reserved for us to do our reusability and recoverability [tests] ... current vehicle is sized for reuse.
The crush core in the Falcon legs is reusable after soft landings, but needs to be replaced after hard.
'The earliest Falcon 9 launches carried parachutes which were to have been used to recover the first stage. However, this was abandoned due to the stage disintegrating during reentry, before the parachutes could be deployed. Instead, SpaceX began to investigate using the stage's engines to make a powered descent and landing. Alongside this, an improved Falcon 9 vehicle, the Falcon 9 v1.1, was developed.'
much bigger [than Falcon 9], but I don't think we're quite ready to state the payload. We'll speak about that next year.
Q. What is strategy on booster recover? Musk: Initial recovery test will be a water landing. First stage continue in ballistic arc and execute a velocity reduction burn before it enters atmosphere to lessen impact. Right before splashdown, will light up the engine again. Emphasizes that we don't expect success in the first several attempts. Hopefully next year with more experience and data, we should be able to return the first stage to the launch site and do a propulsion landing on land using legs. Q. Is there a flight identified for return to launch site of the booster? Musk: No. Will probably be the middle of next year.
The April 17 F9R Dev 1 flight, which lasted under 1 min., was the first vertical landing test of a production-representative recoverable Falcon 9 v1.1 first stage, while the April 18 cargo flight to the ISS was the first opportunity for SpaceX to evaluate the design of foldable landing legs and upgraded thrusters that control the stage during its initial descent.
SpaceX is using private capital to develop and demonstrate the Falcon 9 rocket's reusability. SpaceX has not disclosed how much the reusable rocket program will cost.
Musk said SpaceX made the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage reusable with entirely private funding, investing at least $1 billion in the effort...
SpaceX exists to further [the vision of humans becoming multi-planetary] on several fronts: to develop the reusable rocket technology that would be needed to ferry large numbers of people, and large amounts of cargo, to Mars; ...
A key upgrade to enable precision targeting of the Falcon 9 all the way to touchdown is the addition of four hypersonic grid fins placed in an X-wing configuration around the vehicle, stowed on ascent and deployed on reentry to control the stage's lift vector. Each fin moves independently for roll, pitch and yaw, and combined with the engine gimbaling, will allow for precision landing – first on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, and eventually on land.
The Falcon 9 first stage carries landing legs which will deploy after stage separation and allow for the rocket's soft return to Earth. The four legs are made of state-of-the-art carbon fiber with aluminum honeycomb. Placed symmetrically around the base of the rocket, they stow along the side of the vehicle during liftoff and later extend outward and down for landing.
The Falcon Heavy first stage center core and boosters each carry landing legs, which will land each core safely on Earth after takeoff. After the side boosters separate, the center engine in each will burn to control the booster's trajectory safely away from the rocket. The legs will then deploy as the boosters turn back to Earth, landing each softly on the ground. The center core will continue to fire until stage separation, after which its legs will deploy and land it back on Earth as well. The landing legs are made of state-of-the-art carbon fiber with aluminum honeycomb. The four legs stow along the sides of each core during liftoff and later extend outward and down for landing.
The crush core in the Falcon legs is reusable after soft landings, but needs to be replaced after hard.
The first successful "soft landing" of a Falcon 9 rocket happened in April of this year.
[Falcon 9 v1.1] vehicle has thirty percent more performance than what we put on the web and that extra performance is reserved for us to do our reusability and recoverability [tests] ... current vehicle is sized for reuse.
SpaceX's work with the F9R is part of an effort to develop fully and rapidly reusable launch systems, a key priority for the company. Such technology could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100.
Expendable rockets, which many smart people have worked on in the past, get maybe 2% of liftoff mass to orbit -- really not a lot. Then, when they've tried reusability, it's resulted in negative payload, a 0 to 2% minus payload [laughs]. The trick is to figure out how to create a rocket that, if it were expendable, is so efficient in all of its systems that it would put 3% to 4% of its mass into orbit. On the other side, you have to be equally clever with the reusability elements such that the reusability penalty is no more than 2%, which would leave you with a net ideally of still 2% of usable load to orbit in a reusable scenario, if that makes sense. You have to pry those two things apart: Push up payload to orbit, push down the mass penalty for reusability -- and have enough left over to still do useful work.
At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment.
SpaceX has constructed a half-acre concrete launch facility in McGregor, and the Grasshopper rocket is already standing on the pad, outfitted with four insect-like silver landing legs.
SES's contract with SpaceX called for the rocket to deploy SES 9 into a "sub-synchronous" transfer orbit with an apogee around 16,155 miles (26,000 kilometers) in altitude. Such an orbit would require SES 9 to consume its own fuel to reach a circular 22,300-mile-high perch, a trek that Halliwell said was supposed to last 93 days. The change [SpaceX offered] in the Falcon 9's launch profile will put SES 9 into an initial orbit with an apogee approximately 24,419 miles (39,300 kilometers) above Earth, a low point 180 miles (290 kilometers) up, and a track tilted about 28 degrees to the equator.
This mission is going to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit. Following stage separation, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship. Given this mission's unique GTO profile, a successful landing is not expected.
To space and back, in less than nine minutes? Hello, future.
Musk: "in the upcoming flights [SpaceX will] gather data about the reentry experience of the upper stage. Previously, we had not put a lot of effort into gathering data from the upper stage after it does its disposal burn. We will monitoring at what altitude and speed the stage breaks up…" Collecting this data is not easy. Musk explained that "it's tricky because it comes in like a meteor. It's sort of like a ball of plasma. You can only broadcast diagonally backwards, so we will be looking to communicate, probably [with] the Iridium constellation, and try to transmit basic data about temperature, basic health of the stage, velocity, and altitude."
@18:15 "It is a very tough engineering problem—and it wasn't something that I thought, wasn't sure it could be solved for a while. But then, just relatively recently, in the last 12 months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved. And SpaceX is going to try to do it. Now, we could fail. I am not saying we are certain of success here, but we are going to try to do it. And we have a design that, on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, it does work. Now we need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't, reality wins. So that's to be determined."
This technology element [reusable launch vehicle technology] all this innovation is being done by SpaceX alone, no one is paying us to do it. The government is very interested in the data we are collecting on this test series. ... This is the kind of thing that entrepreneurial investment and new entrants/innovators can do for an industry: fund their own improvements, both in the quality of their programs and the quality of their hardware, and the speed and cadence of their operations.
So it is a bit tricky. Because we have to figure out how to improve the cost of the trips to Mars by five million percent ... translates to an improvement of approximately 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. These are the key elements that are needed in order to achieve a 4 1/2 order of magnitude improvement. Most of the improvement would come from full reusability—somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 orders of magnitude—and then the other 2 orders of magnitude would come from refilling in orbit, propellant production on Mars, and choosing the right propellant.
{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: location (link)I think we are quite close to being able to recover the fairing. ... about a 5 or 6 million dollar piece of equipment. We've got a decent shot of recovering a fairing by the end of the year, and reflight by late this year or early next. ... Upper stage is about 20 percent of the cost of the mission. So if you get boost stage and fairing we're around 80 percent reusable. ... Think for a lot of missions, we could even bring the second stage back. So were going to try to do that, but our primary focus [for the next couple of years will be crew Dragon].
The Dragon capsule has a shape that is stable on reentry from orbit, whereas rocket states traditionally are not stable on reentry, so there is a lot of software involved, a lot of guidance navigation and control involved, and a lot of thermal protection required; so we have to make advances in all those areas. We also have to restart the engines supersonically.
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