Falcon Sir Lauch-A-Lot?

"John Halpenny" wrote in
oups.com:


And, if you argue that it takes vast amounts of money to succeed, then
Delta IV should be 10 times more reliable than the Falcon .

That appears to be true, based on the current record.

--Damon

On 23 Mar 2007 22:50:32 -0700, "John Halpenny"
wrote:

And, if you argue that it takes vast amounts of money to succeed, then
Delta IV should be 10 times more reliable than the Falcon .

No one is arguing that so far as I can see.

Brian

In article ,
richard schumacher wrote:
Did anyone else get creeped out by the sight of the second stage nozzle
glowing orange hot? Yeesh! I hope they remembered that it gets less
cooling in vacuum (that is, in use) than in air (during tests).

Radiation-cooled nozzles often glow quite impressively. The first-stage
nozzles on the old Arianes glowed from takeoff on.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article .com,
Alex Terrell wrote:
Just woke up - read all this and can't decide whether the Falcon 1
flight was a success or whether it was a failure with a positive spin.

Unquestionably a failure -- the customer paid for it to place a satellite
in orbit, and it did not achieve that -- although an informative and
useful failure that came very close to success.

If it had been a *demonstration* launch, without a customer payload, then
you could argue that successfully checking out most of the hardware made
it a partial success. But when there's a paying payload aboard and the
flight plan says "deliver to orbit", it doesn't qualify as any kind of
success unless it makes orbit; making an undesirably low orbit could be a
partial success, but not making orbit at all is unambiguously a failure.

What's a roll excitation, and why doesn't the flight control software
compensate for this?

A roll excitation is a loss of control as reported by a good spokesman. :-)
As for why the flight control software didn't cope, well, it should have.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
Unless folks are practicing double standards (say it ain't so!) then
Falcon 1 F2 was a failure.

It depends on what the goal of the flight was. If it was a flight
test, I'd say that it was a partial success, and the glass is more
than half full.

Flight tests don't have paying payloads aboard. It was a failure.

A very informative failure which showed that nothing is too badly wrong
with the vehicle, yes. But the customer paid for orbit and didn't get it.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

Radiation-cooled nozzles often glow quite impressively. The first-stage
nozzles on the old Arianes glowed from takeoff on.

Ah, thanks.

Is it troubling that the heating on the Falcon nozzle appeared uneven?

richard schumacher wrote:

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

Radiation-cooled nozzles often glow quite impressively. The first-stage
nozzles on the old Arianes glowed from takeoff on.

Ah, thanks.

Is it troubling that the heating on the Falcon nozzle appeared uneven?

Yeah, glowing hot spots are in the flow compression, cold spots are in a
shadow expansion. I thought it didn't look bad, but what does normal glow
look like?

Use the separation attitude, att rates, accel, jerk to move the second stage
engine to avoid the first. It looked like it could gimbal fast enough.

Don't mess with the lifetime (safety) of the engine.

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
Unless folks are practicing double standards (say it ain't so!) then
Falcon 1 F2 was a failure.
It depends on what the goal of the flight was. If it was a flight
test, I'd say that it was a partial success, and the glass is more
than half full.

Flight tests don't have paying payloads aboard. It was a failure.

A very informative failure which showed that nothing is too badly wrong
with the vehicle, yes. But the customer paid for orbit and didn't get it.


Doesn't that just make it a non-validation flight?

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In article . net,
Craig Fink wrote:

richard schumacher wrote:

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

Radiation-cooled nozzles often glow quite impressively. The first-stage
nozzles on the old Arianes glowed from takeoff on.

Ah, thanks.

Is it troubling that the heating on the Falcon nozzle appeared uneven?

Yeah, glowing hot spots are in the flow compression, cold spots are in a
shadow expansion. I thought it didn't look bad, but what does normal glow
look like?

Musk said "The surprise was how cool the nozzle ended up being. It is
capable of glowing white hot and was only a little bit red in places.
We clearly have far more film cooling than is actually needed."

--
David M. Palmer (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)

Henry Spencer wrote:
Radiation-cooled nozzles often glow quite impressively. The first-stage
nozzles on the old Arianes glowed from takeoff on.

They had a beautiful in-flight photo of that taken from one of the
boosters in AW&ST back when Ariane was new.

Pat