…weathers the shutdown. Jeff Foust’s report on last week’s ISPCS conference.
8 thoughts on “Commercial Spaceflight”
Faster please.
It does look like SpaceX may demonstrate reusability faster than expected. Especially by competitors.
They should give the grasshopper to NASA because we can depend on them breaking it. (Is that too snarky?)
XCor may be in Branson’s shadow, but Jeff Greason is a great speaker for promoting commercial space.
The spelling is “XCOR”, btw.
Noted. TY.
Nice article. I hope they all succeed.
SpaceX announced yesterday that they’ve passed the design review for the crewed Dragon abort tests. The pad abort test will likely happen in the spring of next year and the in-flight abort (73 seconds after liftoff at Max-Q) is set for next summer. They’re going to use a Falcon 9 for the in-flight abort instead of a lashup rocket like the Little Joe (Project Mercury) or Little Joe II (Apollo). While using a standard Falcon is likely cheaper than building a new rocket just for the abort test (and more realistic), it does seem a waste of a good rocket. I wonder if they’ll try to recover that first stage to get more test for their money.
I wonder how much work will remain on crewed Dragon after the abort tests before they’ll be ready to launch someone.
It seems unlikely that a Falcon first stage would survive long enough to try a recovery after an abort event – MaxQ on the unprotected top of the stage probably isn’t within the design parameters.
They’d have plenty of excess performance to put a blast shield on top of it if they wanted to.
“It seems unlikely that a Falcon first stage would survive long enough to try a recovery after an abort event.”
The Dragon rides on top of the second stage. As Rand mentions, some sort of blast shield might be possible so that the first stage can complete the mission profile and then attempt a recovery. Of course, they may not want to add that complication to a critical test and perhaps the rocket is cheap enough that they don’t care. I was just thinking about not wasting a good opportunity to get more from the flight.
I wonder if they’ll have a live upper stage or a dummy weighted to model the real thing? It seems pretty wasteful to actually have a full stage that’s never going to fire. Leave off the engine, keep the tanks and fill them either with propellant (to keep all the properties the same) or an equivalent dead weight.
Faster please.
It does look like SpaceX may demonstrate reusability faster than expected. Especially by competitors.
They should give the grasshopper to NASA because we can depend on them breaking it. (Is that too snarky?)
XCor may be in Branson’s shadow, but Jeff Greason is a great speaker for promoting commercial space.
The spelling is “XCOR”, btw.
Noted. TY.
Nice article. I hope they all succeed.
SpaceX announced yesterday that they’ve passed the design review for the crewed Dragon abort tests. The pad abort test will likely happen in the spring of next year and the in-flight abort (73 seconds after liftoff at Max-Q) is set for next summer. They’re going to use a Falcon 9 for the in-flight abort instead of a lashup rocket like the Little Joe (Project Mercury) or Little Joe II (Apollo). While using a standard Falcon is likely cheaper than building a new rocket just for the abort test (and more realistic), it does seem a waste of a good rocket. I wonder if they’ll try to recover that first stage to get more test for their money.
I wonder how much work will remain on crewed Dragon after the abort tests before they’ll be ready to launch someone.
It seems unlikely that a Falcon first stage would survive long enough to try a recovery after an abort event – MaxQ on the unprotected top of the stage probably isn’t within the design parameters.
They’d have plenty of excess performance to put a blast shield on top of it if they wanted to.
“It seems unlikely that a Falcon first stage would survive long enough to try a recovery after an abort event.”
The Dragon rides on top of the second stage. As Rand mentions, some sort of blast shield might be possible so that the first stage can complete the mission profile and then attempt a recovery. Of course, they may not want to add that complication to a critical test and perhaps the rocket is cheap enough that they don’t care. I was just thinking about not wasting a good opportunity to get more from the flight.
I wonder if they’ll have a live upper stage or a dummy weighted to model the real thing? It seems pretty wasteful to actually have a full stage that’s never going to fire. Leave off the engine, keep the tanks and fill them either with propellant (to keep all the properties the same) or an equivalent dead weight.