SpaceX has it on their flight schedule for this year.
Faster, please.
20 thoughts on “Falcon Heavy”
I’m pessimistic. I think they will have a catastrophic failure sometime this year, and it will push their entire schedule back by many months. Maybe the landing legs will peel off the next launch and put the rocket into the water.
Why would you think such a thing? It seems like a dumb thing to think.
Agree about the dumb. As to the why, perhaps our nameless pessimist is a ULA employee worried about the (likely bleak) future of his phony-baloney job.
You gotta protect those phony-baloney jobs and that comment qualifies as a harrumph.
Just a couple weeks ago Musk was quoted saying that he didn’t expect a FH launch until 2015, due to demand for first stage cores.
I’m guessing Obama would like to have such problems with the rollout of Obamacare, but those website failures and delays in mandates don’t seem to be caused by excessive demand.
There are 3 probable reasons why things may have changed
1) They have successfully increased production of F-9 cores and Merlin 1D engines to allow the F-H
to come on line earlier.
2) Customers for the F-9 have backed off on schedule causing the supply of near term cores to bulge.
3) Elon wants to demo the F-H now, and have an argument for getting EELV capability from the USAF.
They had that testy little hearing at the Senate 2 weeks back, and it could be USAF or Staff said “Until you can match the full suite of EELV, why would we want to give you EELV Launch Capability Dollars”.
I suspect Elon figures doing a demo for $200 Million to tap that Billion dollar air force vein, isn’t a bad idea.
What’s happening is the Original SpaceX business model isn’t working, that was small sats off the Falcon 1,
so the next step was the F5, for a Delta 2 class competitor, that didn’t pan out and NASA offered a juicy billion
dollar prize for CRS/COTS,,, So Elon jumped on that, but, that’s an uneven pipeline and an uneven customer, so he’s looking at USAF money….
I don’t blame him, it’s just smart business.
Elon’s a pretty smart business man. One of his other companies sells Electric Vehicles and the Other
leases solar panels on the roofs of people’s homes. Both are making enormous revenue growth.
Imagine all that money from renewable tech and Hippie tech. Must really piss you off.
“Imagine all that money from renewable tech and Hippie tech. Must really piss you off.” Do you seriously imagine that anyone is against electric vehicles or solar energy? Absurd. What people are against is stuff that doesn’t work – subsidies trying to prop up industries that aren’t actually competitive. If solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, the world will switch over on its own and no one will be happier than free-marketers.
Proof once again that liberals are ignorant about what conservatives think and believe so they have to fall back to believing their caricatures.
SpaceX has it on their flight schedule for this year.
They do? Great. In that case they will fly it in 2015 or 2016.
The only way I see it happening early is if for whatever reason they don’t get launch slots or some missions get delayed and they pile up enough cores to try doing a Falcon Heavy launch. I would not bet on it.
PS: I also think it would be a good idea for them to test of the whole stack on a test stand. If they don’t want something like the N1 launch failures to happen again. I wonder what they will do…
“They do? Great. In that case they will fly it in 2015 or 2016.”
This ^^
Um… regarding the SpaceX manifest showing 2014 for FH…. I’m *NOT* certain, but I recall that their manifest reflects the date for the vehicle being put on the pad, not launch. So, this might very well mesh with Musk’s mention of 2015; the FH goes to the pad in December 2014, then launches in early 2051.
Oops, I meant 2015, not 2051!
What Arizona said.
I seem to recall that SpaceX asigns a year to a mission based on when “the vehicle arrives at the launch site.” I can’t seem to find this language on their revised website, but if it still applies, then the assigned year for a mission is based on an event that happens even earlier than rollout to the pad; I have always interpreted it to mean “when the last major part for the mission shows up at the assembly building at Canaveral or V’berg or Brownsville (future) or wherever.”
What I find more interesting than the assignment of 2014 as the year to the first FH mission on the SpaceX manifest is where on the list of 2014 missions they have placed it. It’s situated, as of now, between two F9 missions, the first for Orbcomm and the second for Asiasat. Nasaspaceflight.com’s (NSF) launch manifest – which is organized by scheduled launch date – has the next several F9 missions listed in the same order as they occur on the SpaceX manifest with the exception of the FH, which still has no launch date showing yet for the remainder of 2014 or early 2015 on this generally reliable source. The FH is also missing from the V’berg list of upcoming launches. Given that the NSF schedule shows that the Orbcomm F9 is supposed to go in April and the first of the two consecutive Asiasat missions is scheduled to go in May, the inference of the SpaceX placement of the FH mission is that its major bits should all be at V’berg by some point between the dates the F9 pieces for the Orbcomm and first Asiasat missions arrive at Canaveral. That’s got to be pretty soon; maybe less than 30 days hence. If SpaceX can actually do this, that would appear to put the kibosh on the previous statement that they are too short of F9 first stage cores to do an FH test flight this year.
But there is that nagging lack of any other indications of a scheduled FH launch this year on non-SpaceX sources. There’s also the matter of pre-flight testing. So far as I know, the route followed by major Falcon 9 components is from the Hawthorne, CA factory to the McGregor, TX test facility for test fires of each stage, thence to the launch facility – for now, either Canaveral (usually) or V’berg. I don’t know if SpaceX has yet built a test stand at McGregor capable of accommodating all three first stage cores of an FH at once. That sure seems like something that ought to be on the “to do” list, but I’ve seen no news about completion of such a thing. One could, I suppose, simply test fire all three cores for an FH configuration separately, one at a time, on the F9 test stand, but this would seem a significant departure from SpaceX’s test-as-near-to-flight-configuration-as-possible philosophy which they have observed up to now.
In sum, the presence of FH fairly high up on the SpaceX launch manifest for 2014 seems to be the outlier datum. I’d love to see an FH test flight this spring or summer, but I can’t say that I rationally expect one so soon.
I would find it hard to believe that SpaceX could fly the Heavy without a real test of the propellant cross-feeding.
I recall mention of 2 Falcon Heavy launch profiles. Without cross feed for lighter payloads, and with cross feed for full capacity. The latter works better for return of the boosters to launch site.
The F9H test stand was under construction at McGregor when I visited with RTG in October 2012. (RTG is the rocket test group, a mutual aid society for sharing lessons learned on rocket test stands.)
Sooner the Falcon Heavy flies, the sooner some enterprising Congressman can suggest moving funds from SLS to places in NASA where it’ll really do some good.
I’m pessimistic. I think they will have a catastrophic failure sometime this year, and it will push their entire schedule back by many months. Maybe the landing legs will peel off the next launch and put the rocket into the water.
Why would you think such a thing? It seems like a dumb thing to think.
Agree about the dumb. As to the why, perhaps our nameless pessimist is a ULA employee worried about the (likely bleak) future of his phony-baloney job.
You gotta protect those phony-baloney jobs and that comment qualifies as a harrumph.
Just a couple weeks ago Musk was quoted saying that he didn’t expect a FH launch until 2015, due to demand for first stage cores.
I’m guessing Obama would like to have such problems with the rollout of Obamacare, but those website failures and delays in mandates don’t seem to be caused by excessive demand.
There are 3 probable reasons why things may have changed
1) They have successfully increased production of F-9 cores and Merlin 1D engines to allow the F-H
to come on line earlier.
2) Customers for the F-9 have backed off on schedule causing the supply of near term cores to bulge.
3) Elon wants to demo the F-H now, and have an argument for getting EELV capability from the USAF.
They had that testy little hearing at the Senate 2 weeks back, and it could be USAF or Staff said “Until you can match the full suite of EELV, why would we want to give you EELV Launch Capability Dollars”.
I suspect Elon figures doing a demo for $200 Million to tap that Billion dollar air force vein, isn’t a bad idea.
What’s happening is the Original SpaceX business model isn’t working, that was small sats off the Falcon 1,
so the next step was the F5, for a Delta 2 class competitor, that didn’t pan out and NASA offered a juicy billion
dollar prize for CRS/COTS,,, So Elon jumped on that, but, that’s an uneven pipeline and an uneven customer, so he’s looking at USAF money….
I don’t blame him, it’s just smart business.
Elon’s a pretty smart business man. One of his other companies sells Electric Vehicles and the Other
leases solar panels on the roofs of people’s homes. Both are making enormous revenue growth.
Imagine all that money from renewable tech and Hippie tech. Must really piss you off.
“Imagine all that money from renewable tech and Hippie tech. Must really piss you off.” Do you seriously imagine that anyone is against electric vehicles or solar energy? Absurd. What people are against is stuff that doesn’t work – subsidies trying to prop up industries that aren’t actually competitive. If solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, the world will switch over on its own and no one will be happier than free-marketers.
Proof once again that liberals are ignorant about what conservatives think and believe so they have to fall back to believing their caricatures.
SpaceX has it on their flight schedule for this year.
They do? Great. In that case they will fly it in 2015 or 2016.
The only way I see it happening early is if for whatever reason they don’t get launch slots or some missions get delayed and they pile up enough cores to try doing a Falcon Heavy launch. I would not bet on it.
PS: I also think it would be a good idea for them to test of the whole stack on a test stand. If they don’t want something like the N1 launch failures to happen again. I wonder what they will do…
“They do? Great. In that case they will fly it in 2015 or 2016.”
This ^^
Um… regarding the SpaceX manifest showing 2014 for FH…. I’m *NOT* certain, but I recall that their manifest reflects the date for the vehicle being put on the pad, not launch. So, this might very well mesh with Musk’s mention of 2015; the FH goes to the pad in December 2014, then launches in early 2051.
Oops, I meant 2015, not 2051!
What Arizona said.
I seem to recall that SpaceX asigns a year to a mission based on when “the vehicle arrives at the launch site.” I can’t seem to find this language on their revised website, but if it still applies, then the assigned year for a mission is based on an event that happens even earlier than rollout to the pad; I have always interpreted it to mean “when the last major part for the mission shows up at the assembly building at Canaveral or V’berg or Brownsville (future) or wherever.”
What I find more interesting than the assignment of 2014 as the year to the first FH mission on the SpaceX manifest is where on the list of 2014 missions they have placed it. It’s situated, as of now, between two F9 missions, the first for Orbcomm and the second for Asiasat. Nasaspaceflight.com’s (NSF) launch manifest – which is organized by scheduled launch date – has the next several F9 missions listed in the same order as they occur on the SpaceX manifest with the exception of the FH, which still has no launch date showing yet for the remainder of 2014 or early 2015 on this generally reliable source. The FH is also missing from the V’berg list of upcoming launches. Given that the NSF schedule shows that the Orbcomm F9 is supposed to go in April and the first of the two consecutive Asiasat missions is scheduled to go in May, the inference of the SpaceX placement of the FH mission is that its major bits should all be at V’berg by some point between the dates the F9 pieces for the Orbcomm and first Asiasat missions arrive at Canaveral. That’s got to be pretty soon; maybe less than 30 days hence. If SpaceX can actually do this, that would appear to put the kibosh on the previous statement that they are too short of F9 first stage cores to do an FH test flight this year.
But there is that nagging lack of any other indications of a scheduled FH launch this year on non-SpaceX sources. There’s also the matter of pre-flight testing. So far as I know, the route followed by major Falcon 9 components is from the Hawthorne, CA factory to the McGregor, TX test facility for test fires of each stage, thence to the launch facility – for now, either Canaveral (usually) or V’berg. I don’t know if SpaceX has yet built a test stand at McGregor capable of accommodating all three first stage cores of an FH at once. That sure seems like something that ought to be on the “to do” list, but I’ve seen no news about completion of such a thing. One could, I suppose, simply test fire all three cores for an FH configuration separately, one at a time, on the F9 test stand, but this would seem a significant departure from SpaceX’s test-as-near-to-flight-configuration-as-possible philosophy which they have observed up to now.
In sum, the presence of FH fairly high up on the SpaceX launch manifest for 2014 seems to be the outlier datum. I’d love to see an FH test flight this spring or summer, but I can’t say that I rationally expect one so soon.
I would find it hard to believe that SpaceX could fly the Heavy without a real test of the propellant cross-feeding.
I recall mention of 2 Falcon Heavy launch profiles. Without cross feed for lighter payloads, and with cross feed for full capacity. The latter works better for return of the boosters to launch site.
The F9H test stand was under construction at McGregor when I visited with RTG in October 2012. (RTG is the rocket test group, a mutual aid society for sharing lessons learned on rocket test stands.)
Sooner the Falcon Heavy flies, the sooner some enterprising Congressman can suggest moving funds from SLS to places in NASA where it’ll really do some good.