Falcon Sir Lauch-A-Lot?

In article ,
Damon Hill 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 .

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

No, that appears to be unknowable, based on the current record. There
isn't enough data even on the Delta IV, never mind the Falcon I, to draw
such conclusions. Not even if you count the Delta IV Heavy launch as
three Delta IVs. :-)
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Rand Simberg wrote:

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

I wasn't aware that it had a payload aboard.

Neither was I. There is mention of scheduled payloads on future
launches on their website but nothing about any payloads on "Demoflight 2".

As for spin, what do Henry and co. expect? SpaceX to wring their hands
and cry that it was a failure? As SpaceX notes on their website,

"All in all, this test has flight proven 95+ percent of the Falcon 1
systems, which bodes really well for our upcoming flights of Falcon 1
and Falcon 9, which uses similar hardware."

I can't argue with that.

--
Dave Michelson

Dave Michelson wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote:

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

I wasn't aware that it had a payload aboard.

Neither was I. There is mention of scheduled payloads on future
launches on their website but nothing about any payloads on
"Demoflight 2".


From http://www.spacefellowship.com/News/?p=1922 :

On this mission, dubbed the Demo-2 mission, the vehicle will carry
~50 kg of experiments and associated hardware from the launch site at
Omelek into a 685 km circular orbit with 9° inclination. The payload
consists of the Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) and the Low
Cost Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) Transmitter
(LCT2), developed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) and the mechanical adapter hardware required to interface the
payload with the launch vehicle. The AFSS and LCT2 payloads are not
deployed, but there will be a separation demonstration of an inert
payload immediately after second stage 1st burn main engine shutdown.


I couldn't find this on the SpaceX website, but it reads like a press
release from someone...

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I was punching a text message into my | Reed Snellenberger
phone yesterday and thought, "they need | GPG KeyID: 5A978843
to make a phone that you can just talk | rsnellenberger
into." Major Thomb | -at-houston.rr.com

In article 3l4Oh.76445$zU1.45674@pd7urf1no,
Dave Michelson wrote:
As for spin, what do Henry and co. expect? SpaceX to wring their hands
and cry that it was a failure?

Hardly. But the *topic under discussion* is not SpaceX's take on the
matter, but the assessment of the flight by outside commentators, notably
those right here in these newsgroups. SpaceX has an obvious vested
interest in emphasizing what this flight did accomplish and downplaying
the fact that it was ultimately a failure. But one can reasonably ask
that outside observers, even ones who strongly want the alt-space
community to succeed, take a more balanced view and call a spade a spade.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:27:14 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

In article 3l4Oh.76445$zU1.45674@pd7urf1no,
Dave Michelson wrote:
As for spin, what do Henry and co. expect? SpaceX to wring their hands
and cry that it was a failure?

Hardly. But the *topic under discussion* is not SpaceX's take on the
matter, but the assessment of the flight by outside commentators, notably
those right here in these newsgroups. SpaceX has an obvious vested
interest in emphasizing what this flight did accomplish and downplaying
the fact that it was ultimately a failure. But one can reasonably ask
that outside observers, even ones who strongly want the alt-space
community to succeed, take a more balanced view and call a spade a spade.

I'm certainly willing to do so, but I didn't know it was a spade. I
thought it was a rake. (That is, as I said, I wasn't aware that there
was a payload.)

By the way, you missed an interesting (as usual) Space Access meeting.
It seemed strange without you, though.

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:27:14 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

But one can reasonably ask
that outside observers, even ones who strongly want the alt-space
community to succeed, take a more balanced view and call a spade a spade.

....Yeah, but in this case you had a more complex situation. What you
had was a fork that successfully speared the meatball, extracated it
from the pile of spaghetti with only a couple of noodles clinging to
it while one or two others fell off on the tablecloth, but before the
fork could deliver the meatball to your mouth, it fell off the fork
and rolled under the table and disappeared. And to make matters worse,
while looking for the meatball you dropped the fork and *it*
disappeared as well.

Which means next time SpaceX needs to ditch the fork and use a
spoon...

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

"OM" wrote in message
news
Which means next time SpaceX needs to ditch the fork and use a
spoon...

OM, if you are going to talk about spooning, you can at least bring some
dancers along.

On Mar 20, 6:27 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Well, if nothing else, it's showing the on-time launch reliability
demonstrated by the Shuttle in a privately funded booster.
I still don't think that pre-launch test firing of a engine with an
ablative combustion chamber lining is a good idea.

Pat

Falcon. A few more launches like this and they will have to call it
the Penguin or Dodo.

Rusty

On 26 Mar, 00:08, (Henry Spencer) wrote:
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.

Oh oh - Watch out Henry - Elon Musk is going for the T-shirt - see
their mail content below. Next thing we'll have their lawyer adding in
his bit- "I command you to desist from dissing us, or I'll get
upset ...."
=====================================
The Difference Between a Test Flight and an Operational Satellite
Mission

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the media about what
constitutes a success. The critical distinction is that a test flight
has many gradations of success, whereas an operational satellite
mission does not. Although we did our best at SpaceX to be clear about
last week's launch, including naming it DemoFlight 2 and explicitly
not carrying a satellite, a surprising number of people still
evaluated the test launch as though it were an operational mission.

This is neither fair nor reasonable. Test flights are used to gather
data before flying a "real" satellite and the degree of success is a
function of how much data is gathered. The problem with our first
launch is that, although it taught us a lot about the first stage,
ground support equipment and launch pad, we learned very little about
the second stage, apart from the avionics bay. However, that first
launch was still a partial success, because of what we learned and, as
shown by flight two, that knowledge was put to good use: there were no
flight critical issues with the first stage on flight two.

The reason that flight two can legitimately be called a near complete
success as a test flight is that we have excellent data throughout the
whole orbit insertion profile, including well past second stage
shutdown, and met all of the primary objectives established beforehand
by our customer (DARPA/AF). This allows us to wrap up the test phase
of the Falcon 1 program and transition to the operational phase,
beginning with the TacSat mission at the end of summer. Let me be
clear here and now that anything less than orbit for that flight or
any Falcon 1 mission with an operational satellite will unequivocally
be considered a failure.

This is not "spin" or some clever marketing trick, nor is this
distinction an invention of SpaceX -- it has existed for decades. The
US Air Force made the same distinction a few years ago with the
demonstration flight of the Delta IV Heavy, which also carried no
primary satellite. Although the Delta IV Heavy fell materially short
of its target velocity and released its secondary satellites into an
abnormally low altitude, causing reentry in less than one orbit, it
was still correctly regarded by Boeing and the Air Force as a
successful test launch, because sufficient data was obtained to
transition to an operational phase.

Alex Terrell wrote:
Oh oh - Watch out Henry - Elon Musk is going for the T-shirt - see
their mail content below. Next thing we'll have their lawyer adding in
his bit- "I command you to desist from dissing us, or I'll get
upset ...."


Oh, I remember getting one of those little missives from them over the
"nothing to see here, move along" Merlin engine test.

Pat