sevenperforce

High-altitude winds likely cause of T-0 slip. Non-YouTube livestream, for anyone who wants it:

Launch slipped to 2 PM EST.

Airbags, technically, are small monopropellant hydrazine rocket engines. Per ChrisG, the fairings will not be recovered today, but the fairing recovery testing will continue.

The first MVac burn will perform orbital insertion. Following a coast to establish the argument of periapsis, the second will raise apoapsis about halfway to GTO, in an elliptical orbit with a six-hour period. The third burn, six hours later, will take place at periapsis and burn to depletion for escape.

I've toyed with the idea before. In order for permanent LEO colonization to happen, there has to be a reason for it. You need an economic forcing function. Try as I might, I've never been able to come up with a reason why it would be more suitable to live in space than to live on Earth. Overpopulation? Nope. Yes, overpopulation is a problem, but it is a problem because of consumption, not because of physical space. The entire world population could live comfortably in a single city the size of the United Kingdom, if I recall correctly, but the world population consumes more food and other resources than its arable land can produce. Moving population off-world doesn't help unless the colony is totally self-sufficient and consumes nothing from Earth, which might be possible in the long-run but enough of a short-term solution to find a forcing function here. Labor? It's impossible that any orbital colony would initially be a cheaper place to live than Earth, so the only way to have labor-in-space close economically would be if something very lucrative was being produced in space. However, it would have to be something that only humans could produce. I, for one, can't think of anything that fits that bill. Sure, there are a lot of Earth-economically valuable things that could be produced in space: intellectual property, entertainment, media, legal research, and a thousand other things...but if they can also be produced on Earth, what's the incentive to do it from space? There are certain things that could theoretically only be produced in space, like certain types of crystals that require microgravity to grow, or other manufacturing systems, but anything like that could be done via telepresence and robotics far more cheaply than by squishy humans. Tourism? There aren't nearly enough rich people who want to live in space to finance a whole space colony. Entertainment/reality TV? Sad to say, this is probably the only option which comes close to being a potential fit, but it's a huge investment to start up, and an even bigger gamble. You'd need very deep pockets and a conviction that the viewing public would have more long-term interest in watching Big Brother In Space (or Survivor In Space or The Real Space or Desperate Spacewives or whatever else) than they would in watching the on-Earth equivalent. Successful reality TV is less about the location and more about selecting the ideal personalities and selectively editing the footage to tell a riveting story. What about expat/refugee/anarchy/libertine stuff? Space would certainly be a good place to escape perceived government control. However, the economic forcing function still comes into play. Money is power; if you have enough money to finance a space colony, you have enough money to change the things you do not like in the world. All that being said...if at any point living in space became economically viable, there's a very good chance of an immediate feedback mechanism kicking in.

Why is staging during descent any more risky than staging during ascent? In fact, the N-1 Soviet moon landing program planned to use their Blok D stage as a crasher stage on lunar descent, and the original NOVA direct-ascent lunar lander would have used LOI insertion stage as a crasher as well. It's not "plummeting" either. The maneuver would be very controlled. After lunar-orbit rendezvous and crew transfer from the command module (likely an unmodified Dragon 2 with a hypergolic propulsion assist pallet mated to the payload mount in the trunk) to the lunar module, the command module's RCS would burn retrograde to place the whole stack on a modified orbit with a periapsis of a few hundred meters. The vehicles would separate, and the command module would flip and gently raise its orbit. At this point, the Falcon upper stage carries around nine tonnes of propellant. Between 90 and 33 seconds before periapsis, the MVac fires its final TEA-TEB shot to ignite, first at 90% throttle, then quickly dropping to 40-50% throttle. Those nine tonnes of propellant deplete in 33 seconds at full throttle or in 84 seconds at minimum throttle. If the MVac fails to ignite for any reason, the lunar module is still orbital and can simply separate, fire its engines radial-out, and bring itself back up to a rendezvous with the command module. If the MVac performs nominally, then it will shut down at nearly zero velocity, after which the lunar module separates, kills residual velocity using a puff from the SuperDracos, and lowers itself gently to the surface. For a manned mission, the trunk must carry the same propulsion pallet carried by the command module. At mission end, the SuperDracos fire for initial liftoff and the propulsion pallet kicks in to push into orbit. For a one-way, unmanned mission, there is no lunar-orbit rendezvous; the trunk can carry payload which is dropped out, after which the lunar module lifts itself clear of the payload and dumps itself a safe distance away. One interesting option: if you don't want to man-rate or expend a Falcon Heavy, you can launch the command module on an RTLS (or perhaps ASDS) Falcon 9, then launch a three-core-recovery Falcon Heavy with nothing but an IDA mated to the PAF. The command module can rendezvous with the naked Falcon Heavy upper stage and dock to the IDA, and the Falcon Heavy upper stage can then perform the TLI and LOI burns before being jettisoned in LLO. The crasher-stage lunar lander approach requires the launch vehicle to be attached to the rear of the lunar module, but you can get away with a reusable Falcon Heavy if you use another separate, nose-docked upper stage for the TLI and LOI burns. Probably cheaper to launch three full-reuse Falcon Heavies and one reusable Falcon 9, at the cost of 4 upper stages, than it would be to launch two expendable Falcon Heavies and have to bother with man-rating it. Doing it "proper" for the moon requires orbital propellant transfer, full stop. We don't currently have that capability.

The SuperDracos are definitely very thrusty, but no, cold-gas thrusters won't do it. The Draco thrusters themselves only produce 400N; you would need over 70 of them to soft-land an 8-tonne payload on the moon. Cold-gas thrusters would be even worse. Lunar gravity is low, but this isn't Minmus we're talking about. Of course, you would only need 2 or maybe 4 SuperDracos rather than the 8 that come standard with the Dragon 2. With an 8-tonne vehicle, each SuperDraco gives you 0.91 gees of acceleration on Earth; all 8 firing together will accelerate you away from an RUD at over seven gees. They can, however, throttle down to 14% of their full throttle setting, or lower. With two SuperDracos at 14% throttle, an 8-tonne vehicle would have a net upward acceleration of just 0.095 gees (earth reference), which is perfect for a nice hovering landing. In my proposal, you'd only need the onboard propellant already carried by Dragon 2, because the Falcon 9 upper stage does the suicide burn and the SuperDracos are only used for the last 100-200 m/s of descent.

Curses upon you! (not really) But yes, it's the first reuse of a GTO core, Thiacom-8. The other side-core was an LEO launch, though. Over 13,000 now, and including me. The press kit didn't say anything about it, but one of the diagrams created by a Chris (can't remember which one) from NSF showed a fairing boat for recovery. OCISLY is something like ~350km downrange to catch the falling core... the fairing probably won´t fall that much further downrange. Well, the core will boostback after staging so as to not go quite so far downrange. Fairings will definitely outpace it. Then again, the fairings are super fluffy, so drag is going to cut down on how far they fly.

Whoa. They are doing a SIX HOUR COAST to demonstrate EXTENDED DELAY FALCON UPPER STAGE RESTARTS. So they can demonstrate capability to do GEO insertions. They are recovering the core, but downrange on the ASDS some time after the side-booster RTLS landings.

So...hard...not...to...like...everything

But it is the first coming of Falcon Heavy. And its return to Earth occurs not once, but three times, only a few minutes after launch. Meanwhile, it's twenty centuries later and we're STILL waiting for Christ's boostback, entry, and landing burns. no disrespect to any religion meant; the above is purely satire You know, I believe this is the first time we've gotten a good look at the pneumatic pushing mechanism on the fairings.

RAPTOR UPPER STAGE! But in all seriousness, SpaceX will never plumb a launchpad for both methalox and kerolox on the same vehicle, no matter what their AF funding application may have said.

FUS failure still has an abort mode. The MVac suicide burn is mostly horizontal; if it fails, you can jettison the stage and burn hard-radial-out with the SuperDracos to get headed back up to orbit. Not pretty, but it gets the job done. Abort for LOI burn failure of the crewed capsule is simple, too; the TLI burn out of LEO puts you on a free-return, so if the MVac doesn't ignite at lunar periapsis, you simply jettison it and head home.

It would be less about launching 150-tonne payloads and more about launching 30-40-tonne payloads BLEO.

I still say they won't. This is clearly a Muskism. BUT STILL FALCON SUPER HEAVY They'd need to build a whole new core to be able to handle even higher thrust loading. Core recovery would be virtually impossible, too; the upper stage would basically just be for circularization. More thrust than the Saturn V, though. If you want to do the hard math, you can always dig into Nasa's GR&As for cislunar missions:

Lander, easily. Ascent is where it gets tricky. If you could build a drop-in propulsion assist unit that would mate directly to the payload adapter in the Dragon 2 trunk, with a good 1.9 km/s of dV, you could use the S2 for your crasher-stage suicide burn, detach, and use the SuperDracos for a feather-light landing. Then use the SuperDracos for liftoff before firing up the propulsion assist package to push back up into orbit. Using the SuperDracos for landing and liftoff avoids the risk of debris impingement on your ascent engines, and also allows you to use lighter, smaller, lower-thrust ascent engines. Alternately, you could have a third-party provider build a up-and-down lunar lander of virtually any design, so long as it massed under 16.7 tonnes and could fit in a 5-meter fairing. Falcon Heavy provides the TLI and the LOI insertion, and it could rendezvous in lunar orbit with Orion (or a Dragon 2) for a lunar surface mission.

Bingo. Though throttling the MVac for landing in 0.16 gees is a bit iffy. Better to strip down a Dragon 2 and put the payload in the trunk. Burn the MVac to depletion for zero velocity at 100 m altitude, separate, and use the SuperDracos to hover-land and drop the payload wherever you want it.

Boosters of any Block can be modified into Falcon Heavy side boosters, but they cannot be modified into Falcon Heavy cores. I wonder if we will ever see a FH launch expend end-of-life boosters for the side boosters, but still recover the core. I suppose that if you burn the side boosters to depletion, you should be able to reserve a good bit of braking/boostback propellant in your core and potentially outperform a side-booster-recovery-but-expendable-core launch. Unrelated, I pulled together some delicious performance numbers for FH expendable:

I ran some more numbers, and just for reference... Falcon Heavy, expendable, can deliver: Reference Payloads, Falcon Heavy (expendable) Destination Delta-V (beyond LEO) Payload (tonnes) LEO 0.0 km/s 63.8 GTO 2.27 km/s 26.7 TLI 2.73 km/s 25.2 LLO* 4.04 km/s 16.7 Lunar Surface*† 5.93 km/s 9.0 TMI 4.3 km/s 16.8 *denotes requirement for extended-delay MVac restart; boil-off possible. †not suitable for landing; crasher stage only

A rogue planet, perhaps...something akin to ʻOumuamua, but dwarf-planet-sized? Sure. But we would have seen it coming a LONG time earlier. Not a rogue comet. Wouldn't have mattered. Even if the nuclear shockwave propagated along the magical fault line (wait, why would a comet/asteroid have a fault line??!!), it's not going to split a dwarf planet in half, because the dwarf planet still has gravity holding it together.

He will be a hot spaceman indeed after spending a few days in the sun.

A teensy nudge from Martian gravity could raise the periapsis pretty high.

Hmm, this has the car being deployed from the PAF. I wonder if that was artistic license.

I just about fanboyed to death.

Wait, when is it, EST?