sevenperforce

Will come within 5 solar diameters of the surface.

It actually ends up being less safe, because the crew's safety depends on LEO rendezvous with a waiting crew capsule for entry. As I understand it, the original version has return propellant included, presumably with the thought that they'd eventually upgrade to ISRU. Hydrolox DOES give you a lot of margin in that department. EOR after EOI is WAY more hassle and equipment than LOR with a single return burn. What nonsense!

The current PAF is mass-limited so the mission should really be built around FH's TLI throw, not its LEO throw. I don't know why Zubrin wants to drag earth injection burn propellant all the way to the lunar surface and back, let alone EOI propellant. That's nonsense.

Here's today's mission in KSP:

Iridium-NEXT Flight 5 I had built the Iridium satellites the day before the launch, but I saved the build and flight for the actual day-of.

Who would have thought it would be easier to land a five-story-tall rocket booster than it would be to land a fairing?

Ahh, dammit.

Presumably Elon would have said something nice by now if the recovery attempt had been successful.

Fairing splashdown should be right about now....

Nah, they fly south, and they flew out of Vandy anyway. So...probably over Chile? My South American geography is crap. EDIT: Of course not. Chile shares longitude with Maine. What was I thinking? They will be over open ocean until they hit Antarctica.

This is the one-year anniversary of the first Falcon 9 first stage reflight. Wow. Seems like just yesterday. Callout for stage 1 splashdown, stage 2 SECO, nominal parking orbit insertion.

Stage 1 LOS.

T-1 minute. Falcon 9 is in startup. Pressed for flight. Ignition! Liftoff! Already pitching downrange! Falcon 9 is supersonic. Really clear shots around the engine area. The white legs and dark first stage is nice contrast. Surprising to see how much apparent flame there is around the outside of the octaweb. Good MECO. Sep! MVac ignition! Beautiful, beautiful shots of the receding booster lit by the morning sun and the impingement plume from the MVac. We are doing a one-engine boostback burn today...has that ever happened before? Fairing separation. "We will be attempting a recovery of one of the fairings today on our fairing recovery ship, Mr. Steven...as part of our experimental programs for reuse." This is the fifth launch for Iridium and they have used only 3 rockets to do it.

This is the first time that they've ever explicitly said they plan to attempt fairing recovery.

In practice, there's a total moratorium of in-atmosphere tests on any NTRs, because in theory some of the liquid hydrogen will mutate by neutron capture and turn radioactive. Even though there's NO actual risk of harm. From that part, at least.

Good god, man.

As promised, here's the album from today's launch!

He meant payload numbers, not pricing numbers. They won't completely shut down F9 core production; they've got to have a decent fleet operating. But yes, reuse has been as much about increasing launch cadence (without making operating costs skyrocket due to much larger staff) as anything else. I expect their assembly lines will not shrink significantly; they are already skeleton-crew in that department now. Around 11 tonnes IIRC but I haven't re-crunched all the numbers yet.

Beidou-3 and Beidou-4 First flight with Long March! Shame there are no livestreams of these. Guess ya gotta make do with this, then.

The FH base performance numbers are absolutely wrong. Those are the same numbers that were originally listed for Falcon Heavy before F9 was uprated and they have not increased. Block V FH with all-stage recovery performs much better.

SpaceX will price F9 expendable slightly higher than FH reusable, to incentivize FH flights. And FH reusable outperforms F9 expendable to all destinations. The numbers online are an early sandbag.

@sh1pman @Ultimate Steve (re: ongoing price discussions) The markup, I think, is between Falcon 9 (w/ recovery) and Falcon Heavy (w/ recovery). SpaceX needs to recoup its investments into FH, so even though actual operating costs for a Falcon Heavy with full recovery may only be $5M or so (assuming high amortization value on the side boosters), they price FH at $90M rather than $67M so they make more profit. After all, they can charge pretty much whatever they want; they are literally the cheapest game in town. Also, keep in mind that amortization fraction may not be a constant. On the one hand, the FH core is different from the F9 core and probably costs more to make. But the stresses on the side boosters is far lower than the stress on a F9 core. So you have to look at higher refurbishment costs and fewer uses for a F9 core than for a FH side booster.

F9 expendable launch is $92 million. FH is $90 million. Interestingly enough, Elon quoted FH with the core expended at $95-97 million, suggesting per-booster operating costs of only $2.5 million per flight in comparison to the cost of an expendable Falcon 9. But obviously there is some scale-sliding for marketing and business purposes here.

The undeniable fact that FH reusable is cheaper than F9 expendable is the WHOLE reason FH was developed.

Just flew this mission; it will come up in a few.