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Skylon

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3 minutes ago, Brotoro said:

Seems to be more of those lately. I wonder if they have tightened up the windows for acceptable data values.

Or that they're slowly reaching the limits of reusability.

Ageing furniture and an escalating launch rate ain't working well together sometimes... :sealed:

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4 hours ago, grawl said:

Or that they're slowly reaching the limits of reusability.

Ageing furniture and an escalating launch rate ain't working well together sometimes... :sealed:

I mean, many of those are weather related. The scrub before this one for instance

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4 hours ago, grawl said:

Or that they're slowly reaching the limits of reusability.

Ageing furniture and an escalating launch rate ain't working well together sometimes... :sealed:

No, rockets scrub for a million reasons. Why do you immediately assume it is an issue with the reuse feature, without finding out what happened?

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3 cores, three times the number of sensor limits that could be violated. I also think talk of reusability limits being violated is premature.

Also, the centre core is never before flown and the side boosters have flown twice. This falcon heavy is a rookie by falcon standards.

It could be they've recently encountered a new fleet issue that they're currently keeping an enhanced eye on, or it may be a higher number of scrubs right now is just dumb luck.

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Side note: Remember the cut-down nozzle on the Merlin Vacuum on some of the second stages? 8 minutes in, the announcer dropped the fact that there are three 2nd stage configurations: standard, medium and long coast, depending on how long it needs to operate after launch. If the short Mvac is related to those, is the cut-down the new Standard?

Edited by AckSed
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55 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Side note: Remember the cut-down nozzle on the Merlin Vacuum on some of the second stages? 8 minutes in, the announcer dropped the fact that there are three 2nd stage configurations: standard, medium and long coast, depending on how long it needs to operate after launch. If the short Mvac is related to those, is the cut-down the new Standard?

Nozzle size impacts efficiency but it wouldn't be particularly meaningful for operation duration.

The longer-coasting upper stages have the grey solar-thermal band around the kerosene tank to prevent freezing, plus extra COPVs to support ullage repress and more engine restarts. I'm guessing long-coast simply has more extra COPVs than medium-coast.

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I'm not sure. Length of coast isn't necessarily related to DV performance, though certainly higher energy manoeuvres such as GEO insertion or LO insertion requires longer coasts so there is some correlation. But if you burn immediately for a high energy earth departure then you'll need a regular nozzle but won't need endurance mods.

It could make sense that Standard is the new half-cut MVac, Medium is Falcon Upper Stage Classic, and Long Coast is upper stage with endurance mods.

Alternatively Standard could be the regular upper stage, Medium is with the usual long-coast mods, and Long-Coast is a new ultra-long coast spec for lunar missions and such, with short MVacs an option on all of them.

I'm speculating. Definitely interested to find out more.

Edited by RCgothic
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8 minutes ago, Nuke said:

dirty rockets. we have come far. 

Center core has an bad feeling about this mission. 
Yes after releasing second stage you will teleport back to pad, so why are the boosters dirty? 

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