They had a successful static fire at Vandenberg, in preparation for the JASON 3 launch on Sunday, with the last existing version 1.1. We may go up to Lompoc this weekend to watch.
Meanwhile, they just released a new edit of the landing video from December.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s the story on the static firing.
SpaceX can land because they start with nine-engines, so one engine at full throttle only has 1/9th of the liftoff thrust and when throttled down can nearly match the weight of an empty stage. But a first stage with just a few engines wouldn’t be able to sufficiently throttle one down for a landing. So it just occurred to me that if it had a smaller engine at the top of the stage that was aimed upwards and used for braking after stage separation, you could use that engine in the landing approach to cancel some of the thrust of one of the lift-off engines, allowing you to adjust the net thrust of the stage well below the lowest throttle setting of a single engine.
It’s an idea that’s almost, but not quite, useless, but since I had it only about two minutes ago I thought I’d share.
Awesome video. The only thing it’s missing is footage of the landing taken from the first stage. Perhaps there wasn’t much to see in the darkness other than the rocket plume. Sunday’s launch and drone ship landing attempt are scheduled for daylight hours, so hopefully they’ll get that footage then (and, more importantly, demonstrate that they can recover first stages even when they don’t have the performance margin to bring them all they way back to the launch site).
As I’m sort of “in the business” it is always interesting to see the videos of the Space-X engineers. What do you think the average age is of that crowd? I’ll guess 28… From what I’ve heard from people that have left here to work there, a 48-60 hour work week is pretty standard. That works pretty well if you are under 30 but I fear that Space-X will have huge problems keeping this sort of effort over the long haul. I hope not but I expect to see some serious human burnout induced failures in the next 5 years. Which is sad because it doesn’t have to be this way. From videos I’ve seen, Blue Origin’s crew seems much more relaxed with a healthy mix of older and young engineers. Maybe I’m worried about nothing, just an old engineer yelling at the clouds and these new kids. Anyone care to comment?
Doug Messier has been concerned about that for years. The average age at NASA is currently late forties, I think, but during Apollo, it was mid twenties. One of the sacrifices that most aren’t aware of is how many divorces and premature deaths resulted from the schedule to do it “before the decade was out.”
Right. I know it’s not politically correct to mention it but… It also looks like there is quite a good number of female engineers there as well. In my experience, a good portion of them drop to part time when they start a family. In my department about 80% of the woman with young kids are on either 1/2 or 3/4 time. Of course that isn’t just woman anymore, just last week we lost a guy to stay home with his kids. Add to the fact that they are based in LA and you cut down on the affordability of starting a young family. Or am I mistaken and they moved the engineering to Texas?
Still huge staff in LA, I think, though growing in Florida.
So you are somehow making out to be a *bad* thing that SpaceX attracts so many female engineers?
(on top of them being so young too!!!)
I’m sure they will get off your lawn eventually. 🙂
You’ve worked with large numbers of engineers, male and female, over a period of years? If not, please share with us what makes your opinion so much better than Ryan’s.
Sorry, but I get very tired of people (mostly lefties, in my experience) who claim to be telepathic, or who pigeonhole someone’s opinions based on nothing more than bigotry.
Please enlighten us – on what EVIDENCE do you say his comments amount to “get off my laen.”?
Young engineers are energetic and full of new ideas. Which is great at first. You can get a lot done quickly, if your willing to work them too the bone. (and believe me SX is working them into the ground) But they also make stupid rookie mistakes, especially when they are tired. That works ok for Si Valley software punks because no one dies when your app doesn’t work right. “Just let the users find the bugs and then we patch them” It’s hard to do that when you are going Mach 15 at 400,000 ft. When I worked at NASA Dryden they had a 10 hour safety rule. Didn’t matter if you were the janitor or the test pilot, after 10 hours of work, you went home.
Old farts, hopefully bring experience and moderation. What you want is a nice mix of thoughtful un-pc old bastards that are encouraged to help guild the younglings. As an example: Young kid says “We should try X” and the old guy says “We tried that back in the early 90’s.” Now in a healthy organization the old guy will also say “It failed because Y. Can you change that?” In an all young org the new kids run off and waste time and money rediscovering Y, before they start poring more money into fixing it.
Then comes the other problem with having too many young guns. They are going to start to build a life outside of work. About 80% of your work force will want kids. Now, if they are good engineers (I assume you have hired good ones) when some of them leave or cut time you will lose that expensive experience you had to pay to rediscover. Add that to the constant grinding 10+hour days, six days a week and you are going to have long term retention problems on top of human error problems.
Now Git Off My Lawn!
Young kid says “We should try X” and the old guy says “We tried that back in the early 90’s.” Now in a healthy organization the old guy will also say “It failed because Y. Can you change that?”
Back in 1986, I was a young 2 LT in the Air Force. The work I was brought into the service to perform was delayed, so I was loaded out to Space Command HQ to work for the Director of Analysis for 6 months. It was a great job and I got to work with some very experienced people. From time to time, I’d bring up some “new” idea. One of them would walk over to a safe and pull out a thick binder. “We looked into that in 1968. Here’s the results.” While technology had changed a great deal, physics hadn’t. It was a great learning experience.
Some things that weren’t possible or economically viable 20 years ago might be viable today. Physics hasn’t changed, but the technology sure has. Some things that used to require very expensive satellites can now be done with microsats or even cubesats. These are cheaper to build, cheaper to launch, and cheaper to operate. Business models are also changing. Previously, satellite builders solely focused on selling their wares to others. Now, some are building their satellites and selling the data. The first example I know of this was by companies like DigiGlobe that flies their own imagery satellites and sells the images to the government and other customers. Now, microsats and cubesats are also entering that arena. In addition, companies like Spire are building small satellites to provide weather data that is sold to customers.
The second part of your statement is the most important. That’s the part where the old guy tells the new guy what they did and why, and asks if the new guy can find a better way. You don’t want the new engineers wasting a lot of time and money reinventing a wheel that failed for reasons that can’t be overcome by technology. If the physics is wrong, the idea is doomed. But you also don’t want to say that “it didn’t work then, so it’s impossible now” if it failed for technology reasons.
This is a point I make in the importance of documenting trade studies. If you don’t know why a certain design was selected, you can’t know what to do in the future if circumstances change.
Fatigue can lead to expensive mistakes. Whether that was a contributing factor to last June’s failure is unknown but it didn’t help. SpaceX is still running the race almost at a sprint. Anyone who tries to run a marathon at a sprinter’s pace isn’t going to get very far. Eventually, they’ll have to normalize the working hours. Burnout leads to talent drain. They’re working on youthful exuberation right now but that can only last for so long.
60 hours a week sucks, to be sure, but a person can keep it up indefinitely if he has to or wants to. It was normal in the USA and UK during the 19th century and is today in China and India.
How many people doing 60 hours weeks routinely were doing brain intensive work?
I suspect there will be, for the foreseeable future, an adequate supply of “28 year old” engineers to replace those that “burn out”.
But if the knowledge and experience walks out the door, you’ve lost a lot. Companies don’t have experience – people do. I recently saw a Boeing video showing the company’s experience in aviation and space. It included the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. Those were built by McDonnell and Rockwell, which are now part of Boeing. However, the people who built those capsules are long gone (retired or dead) and so is their experience.
From what I’ve read, a lot of the young SpaceX engineers move on after a few years. When you’re ready to get a life you quit and find another job. Bonus: having SpaceX on your resume is pure gold. I think that model is sustainable for SpaceX as long as they are considered the primo place to work for young engineers right out of college.
There is a lot they don’t, and probably can’t, teach in school. You learn a lot of real life engineering the first few years on the job, at least if you’re going to be a really good engineer.
I appreciate Ryan and Larry’s comments. I saw and thought similar things. I was also a bit concerned about the emotional excitement. The landing enthusiasm was well deserved, but some people started their emotional high, pretty high, with just the vehicle being sighted near the pad. Certainly a major feat in that close of a return, but they’ve done that before, and I expected a bit more concern at that point. Still, great job worthy of a good celebration.
Yeah, I’ve watched enough rocket launches, good and bad, to the point where I tend to hold my breath until they reach orbit safely.
In this case, I didn’t exhale until several seconds after the landing, to make sure the stage didn’t fall over. And I was concerned about that fire at the base after engine cutoff, worrying that it might spread.
Still looking forward to the camera view of the landing from the Falcon 9 itself:
Chris B – NSF @NASASpaceflight 22 Dec 2015
I’m reliably informed there’s *amazing* footage of the Falcon 9 OG2 S1 external cam view of the staging, boost back, entry burn and landing!
https://twitter.com/…399307271892992
Chris B – NSF @NASASpaceflight 22 Dec 2015
And no, I’ve not seen it. I know people who have. Hoping SpaceX will release it at some point. It sounds epic!
https://twitter.com/…399855073136641
Bob Clark
Am I the only one that doesn’t like the music totally over-riding everything else that is going on in the video?