Falcon 1: Third Time Was ALMOST the Charm

Watching the webcast right before telemetry was lost, it looked like the
vehicle was going into a spiral - the guidance was chasing the trajectory and
the oscillations were getting larger and larger.

Too bad - first stage, staging and fairing sep looked clean. The webcast was
pretty good too.

--
You can run on for a long time,
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down.
~Johnny Cash

Herb Schaltegger wrote in
.com:

Watching the webcast right before telemetry was lost, it looked like
the vehicle was going into a spiral - the guidance was chasing the
trajectory and the oscillations were getting larger and larger.

Too bad - first stage, staging and fairing sep looked clean. The
webcast was pretty good too.

The pretty pictures will tell almost as much as the telemetry.
I'd say it was unique that an orbital launch vehicle had an
ignition abort and was launched in spite of that only an hour
later. A full success would have been great, but SpaceX otherwise
had a pretty good day. Hopefully their next launch will come
in reasonably short order.

--Damon

Damon Hill wrote:
Herb Schaltegger wrote:

A full success would have been great, but SpaceX otherwise
had a pretty good day.


Company founder Elon Musk told reporters the Falcon I successfully
reached space, "and retired almost all the risk associated with the
rocket."


Right. The investors are lining-up right now and soon, we'll all be
living on Uranus.

"Bad Idea" wrote in message
ups.com...

Damon Hill wrote:
Company founder Elon Musk told reporters the Falcon I successfully
reached space, "and retired almost all the risk associated with the
rocket."

Right. The investors are lining-up right now and soon, we'll all be
living on Uranus.

I find his statement credible. True there is a 2nd stage problem to be
resolved, but this was the first flight test of the second stage. The first
stage failure of the fist flight test meant that the 2nd stage simply wasn't
tested.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Jeff Findley wrote:

Company founder Elon Musk told reporters the Falcon I
successfully reached space, "and retired almost all the risk
associated with the rocket."

Right. The investors are lining-up right now and soon, we'll
all be living on Uranus.

I find his statement credible. True there is a 2nd stage
problem to be resolved, but this was the first flight test of
the second stage. The first stage failure of the fist flight
test meant that the 2nd stage simply wasn't tested.

I suspect that if this was a NASA or Boeing or Lockheed-Martin test
any claim by one of their representatives that they had "retired
almost all the risk associated with the rocket" would be greeted by
snorts of derision around here and in the alt.space community in
general.

That being said I hope Musk and company are as pleased as they
claim to be about yesterday's test. Clearly progress was made.

Jim Davis

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:11:02 -0500, Jim Davis wrote
(in article 6):

Jeff Findley wrote:

Company founder Elon Musk told reporters the Falcon I
successfully reached space, "and retired almost all the risk
associated with the rocket."

Right. The investors are lining-up right now and soon, we'll
all be living on Uranus.

I find his statement credible. True there is a 2nd stage
problem to be resolved, but this was the first flight test of
the second stage. The first stage failure of the fist flight
test meant that the 2nd stage simply wasn't tested.

I suspect that if this was a NASA or Boeing or Lockheed-Martin test
any claim by one of their representatives that they had "retired
almost all the risk associated with the rocket" would be greeted by
snorts of derision around here and in the alt.space community in
general.

That being said I hope Musk and company are as pleased as they
claim to be about yesterday's test. Clearly progress was made.

Jim Davis



I hope so too. One thing that occurred to me watching the videos again this
morning (they're available from the SpaceX site and on YouTube) is how much
oscillation was induced by staging. It was as if one of the pneumatic
pushers stuck or another pushed too hard. Clearly SOMETHING upset the
orientation of the vehicle pretty severely. Same thing (to a lesser degree)
with fairing separation. That seemed to get settled down pretty quickly
after second stage ignition, but the oscillations started up again (probably
unrelated) within a minute or so. You can watch the engine gimbaling further
and further in a circular motion as it chases the trajectory and fights
whatever the upset was.

Too bad it didn't make it to orbit but this was still progress.

Another slight aside - it was fun to watch the first stage engine plume
expand with lower pressure as altitude increased. I hope SpaceX has done a
LOT of CFD and wind tunnel testing to see how nine of those engines will
interact on Falcon 9.

--
You can run on for a long time,
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down.
~Johnny Cash

SpaceX is still trying to prove that a 60:1 ratio of rocket/payload
that's starting off with a nearly 30% inert GLOW isn't exactly all
that doable without benefit of those smart Jewish Third Reich wizards,
especially if such an effort were intended for having to orbit and
land whatever tonnage upon our moon, along with having spare fuel and
multiple other resources for returning whatever back safely to mother
Earth.

However, an early commercial satellite (HGS-1) did in fact manage to
orbit our moon, and having since returned to Earth as currently parked
in GSO. That nifty effort however took considerable time, as well as
damn good fly-by-rocket expertise that doesn't seem to exist within
anything that's NASA.

HUGHES SATELLITE ORBITS MOON, HEADS BACK TO EARTH
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...a4795b571373e6

HGS-1 (to the moon and back)
http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites...onCommsat.html
This level of accomplishment proves that such an orbital capture of
something moon like is in fact quite doable, although instead of an
icy proto-moon having a rocket engine for parking itself within the
nearly GSO orbit, a little good-luck of random happenstance of
aerobraking and/or glancing lithobraking sort of effort should have
accomplished the task of having established an orbit, as obviously
much further away than GSO, along with that sucker having lost a few
teratonnes worth of salty ice as deposited upon having impacted Earth,
and/or as having spent whatever remainder of that thick icy covering
(possibly as originally having been as great as 262 km thick) into
orbit, with a few of those secondary impact shards of such teratonne
worthy icebergs smashing into Earth from time to time, that is before
such space-icebergs all managed to vaporise into something worth less
than thin air.

Too bad that we still haven't established any hard science on behalf
of our understanding any real prospects of such raw ice surviving
within 1AU space.
-
Brad Guth