The private company Space X will try once again to get a Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. This fourth launch attempt could be as early as September 28!
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| The static firing engine test for the Falcon 1. |
They just had a "static firing" a test of the engines with the rocket strapped down. Everything looked pretty good, but they detected a minor fault in the second stage liquid oxygen supply. They’ll be replacing a component in that system just to be safe.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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September 23rd, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Wow!!! These guys don’t wait around! I guess that’s the benefit of being a private company. No bureaucracy to deal with, and endless committees and commissions to find out what went wrong. Identify the problem, deal with it, then move on. Maybe a certain government agency could learn a thing or two…?
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Well I hope the 4th time is the charm for those guys. I don’t think they’ll make it to a 5th try if it fails unfortunately.
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
that second stage again. Well here is luck to going higher than that silly virgin airplane thingy.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Good luck in this noble effort.
Really old-timers (like me) will remember the Great Sputnik Panic of 1957-58, the hysteria in the media and the wailing and gnashing of teeth in Washington when the Soviets beat us to the first satellite launch. In retrospect, things weren’t really that bad, but it led to a huge influx of funding for science and science education and a new emphasis on science and engineering in our national life.
We need something like a 21st Century Sputnik to get things going, a spectacular space feat from an unexpected quarter to focus the minds of politicians and the masses. The potential for something like this exists if somebody with the bucks also has the vision.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I have a good feeling about this time around!
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
@Michael L
cough…NASA…cough,cough
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
@Daniel:
cough… you didn’t hear it from me… cough
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Go Space X, go! And if something goes wrong, lets not cut the feed
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I hope they manage to avoid flying into the giant Q this time.
And have they learned from their mistakes? Do they have a Plan B for the folks doing the broadcast? Or is it just”nothing can possibly go wrong, so if it does, just turn off the cameras as fast as you can!” – again?
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I’ll be watching and hoping, just like the last time!
I bet this time it’s pretty much now or never… I mean… this can’t be cheap.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:58 pm
They are already working on Falcon 1 flights 5,6 and 7 (from their website) so a failure here would be unfortunate, but I don’t think it would be game-ending.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Fingers crossed! I really hope they make it this time. I don’t think they will ever give up, they have the money and the determination to succeed. Go Falcon!
September 24th, 2008 at 4:56 am
If #4 is not successful, Elon should perhaps consider sticking with electric cars. That has been a great success. Well, it seems so anyway…
September 24th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Michael L:
“I guess that’s the benefit of being a private company. No bureaucracy to deal with, and endless committees and commissions to find out what went wrong. Identify the problem, deal with it, then move on. Maybe a certain government agency could learn a thing or two…?”
While I agree that there are definite benefits to being a private company unencumbered by bureaucracy, keep in mind that NASA, or (ahem) I mean “a certain government agency”, often has several astronauts perched atop their rockets. It’s one thing to loose a rocket due to not properly diagnosing an issue. It’s quite another to loose both the rocket AND the lives of several astronauts taking them away from their families.
Best of luck to Space X. The more accessible space travel is the better!
September 24th, 2008 at 8:42 am
While I wish the Space-X team all the best I’ve got to state my views here on the comparison of Public versus Private space programmes.
Lets compare their results : While NASA in particular regularly comes in for what is really pretty unfair and ungrateful criticism here, lets never forget how good it has been and what a remarkable and unparalleled record of success NASA (incl. JPL) can boast having :
1. Put 12 men (& sadly so far only men) on the lunar surface. It & other public space agencies have put hundreds of other people, men and women, (no children yet though!
) incl. the occasional space tourist into orbit – & being doing so since the 1960’s.
OTOH, Private enterprise (a.k.a. the obscenely rich) have so far recently managed a few sub-orbital flights – putting them about fifty years or more behind NASA!
2. Launched spaceprobes to every planet. It has landed rovers on the russet sands of Mars – three times! It has sent four spaceprobes – the two Pioneers and ‘Voyagers’ beyond our solar system towards the stars, it has touched the icy slush of Titan and sent probes into oblivion inside the ever denser clouds of Jupiter. It has several probes on Mars now including ‘Phoenix’ on its polar regions, two rovers still gamely plugging on and a couple of handy orbiters around that world and Saturn and missions passing Mercury in a quicksilver set of manoeuvres and on their way to Pluto, Ceres and Vesta, a comet or two and more.
OTOH private enterprise has sent not one, that is zero, zip, niente, nada, nil, spaceprobes anywhere and, as far as I know, isn’t even planning to do so.
3. Built some of the most remarkable pieces of engineering in human history – the Saturn V Apollo craft and the re-useable space plane that is the Space Shuttle being exemplars but also all the probes and landers and rovers among other technological marvels. Plus the ISS and ‘Skylab’ Space Stations too although another public space agency – Russia’s – has arguably equalled or beaten them on this score with their Mir and Salyut stations.
OTOH private enterprise has at its best built a ‘Spaceship Two’ – cool but not quite in the same league and with nowhere near the capabilities of any recent NASA craft.
4. Launched and run the Hubble Space Telescope, the Fermi Gamma –ray Observatory, the IRAS infra-red, Uhuru X-ray and many other space observatories which have done more than almost anything else to improve our understanding and appreciation of the cosmos. No astronomer can say we don’t owe NASA big-time for the HST alone!
OTOH Private space agencies build a scientific observatorywhere data is y’know shared by scientists globally? .. Hahahhahaa! Gawd No!! Never.
5. NASA have worked in partnership with other nations and institutions and has helped to construct an atmosphere of international peace through such things as the ISS and the ‘Apollo-Soyuz’ match up. It has used the space race to abrade down the Soviet empire and its prestige value and political and ambassadorial impact is one of the best assets the USA has.
OTOH Private enterprise? Well, this is quite simply always going to be an arena where only public, government space agencies and not corporate players can act.
So where the records speaks public space enterprise is astronomical units or maybe even light years or parsecs ahead of the private entrepreneurs.
Beyond the record s there’s more than that, private corporate space agencies have an unfixable flaw.
Their problem is the way we humans – & particularly big profit-seeking companies think regarding the short-term versus the long term. Big companies put raking in stacks of profit first above absolutely everything else – above human rights, above the environment, above the future esp. the longer term future. That’s why they can’t be trusted to develop space exploration or work for the longer term benefit – even if that ‘longer term’ is just decades off rather than fifty or a hundred years.
That axiom is why “corporate ethics” is an oxymoron, why business needs to be regulated and cannot be trusted to run public services or act for the good of society.
Space travel, & space-based scientific research is beyond the bounds of narrow commercial instances and requires government involvement by necessity. It takes time, it involves intangible and serendipitous benefits as well as the more obvious $-making ones and it takes an awfully big amount of moolah. Plus it provides long and medium term benefits to everyone – not just the few consumers or stock-holders of any one large corporation.
That means, by necessity, governments need to be involved and indeed, whole societies do. That’s why NASA is a public, government organisation not an R & D branch of say, MacDonnell-Douglas or Boeing. Private industry, the multinational corporations are by their nature intrinsically unsuited to running broad-based, public-national-&-International good, long-term space programs.
Tragically, the United States has been ideologically blinded to this truism for a long while now; wrongly mesmerised by rhetoric about untrammelled capitalism that in the long run hurts & is hurting everyone making our planetary & most personal futures far worse than they need be.
Is there a place for private enterprise in space? Of course there is, probably more so later on when costs go down and technology improves for greater accessibility.
But do we also – or even more – need NASA and organisations like it; nationally or even internationally run government based space programs looking out for everyone’s interests and everyone’s future rather than immediate piles of money? Absolutely yes!
Working combined as a society – with good government leaders helping people combine their efforts together we can land on the Moon or reach for Mars and beyond. To achieve this what NASA really needs IMHO is :
I) Proper funding – say maybe about half the amount currently being wasted in occupying Iraq and funding Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
II) Proper visionary leadership that can explain & inspire the public to back their progress.
III) Proper focus – a directed program with a specific deadline eg. Moon by 1970.
I suggest the USA redirects its money & efforts towards funding and supporting NASA and relive or better still out do its previous finest hour & greatest ever achievement – NASA’s Apollo moon-landings!
I hope to see more towards that & less ungrateful NASA-bashing from folks here!
Oh yeah, I also still hope Space X goes well and lifts off successfully too – as long as we don’t get too carried away with that sucess and forget how much better NASA & public (ie. everyones!) space agencies are!
September 24th, 2008 at 9:03 am
(*applauds StevoR*)
~David D.G.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:08 am
It’s all good and fine for Elon and company to rush ahead launch another rocket, it’s on their dime. When somebody is spending taxpayer money (let alone putting people on the rocket), I like to see a little less rush-to-action after three failures in a row.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:20 am
@StevoR
Your equating private companies with NASA is a rather unfair comparison. A better comparison would be to compare the companies to NASA as it was way back at the beginning. Now, I’m not well versed in this, but how many failures did NASA have before they got a working rocket? How many flights did they do before putting people on their rockets? How long did it take them before they delivered satellites into higher orbits?
As for human rights, that is why we have laws and consequences, which are a bit more effective at ensuring companies treat people well than at ensuring governments treat people well. Further, to suppose that a private company would be unable to plan for even a decade into the future because they want to “rake in profits”, well, I guess pharmaceutical companies must not be private corporations, since they plan a decade or more into the future. Yes, they will have short-term projects to bring in money, but if they are any business worth their salt, they will also have concurrent projects that take a longer term to implement and will ensure more profits for them once it is implemented.
Just a couple quick thoughts on what I saw as a couple flaws in your arguments against private space exploration.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:20 am
SteveoR said Proper focus – a directed program with a specific deadline eg. Moon by 1970.
I think they already did that one Steveo.
Otherwise only a couple of minor quibbles but on the whole a very agreeable post. As I like to put it, NASA for exploration and private enterprise for exploitation.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Argh .. even editing in word first there’s still stuff that needs editing -which of course I can’t do on the orginal post. *SIGH *
Please BA for Freya’s* sake let us edit here! Please!
* Freya = the old Norse god that gives us Fridays – well the name for ‘em anyhow. I believe in Freya as much as I do in the Flying Sphaghetti Monster but hey with this prissy swearing filter what else can I say!?
——-
Okay, lets get the (metaphorical) red pens and correcting fluid out.
First the five main achievements of NASA should be in bold text kinda like this :
“While NASA, in particular, regularly comes in for what is really pretty unfair and ungrateful criticism here, lets never forget how good it has been and what a remarkable and unparalleled record of success NASA (incl. JPL) can boast having :
1. Put 12 men (& sadly so far only men) on the lunar surface. …
2. Launched spaceprobes to every planet. …
3. Built some of the most remarkable pieces of engineering in human history. …
4.Launched and run the Hubble Space Telescope, the Fermi Gamma –ray Observatory, the IRAS infra-red, Uhuru X-ray and many other space observatories…
&
5. NASA have worked in partnership with other nations and institutions and has helped to construct an atmosphere of international co-operation and peace …”
Oh & note for 2 that while spaceprobes have been launched to the planets Pluto and Ceres they haven’t got there yet – & yes they are planets for Freyas sake, the 9th and 4 & 1/2th respectively!
Now nitpicks – just a few there’s no doubt many more I can’t be bothered correctin’ here… (Sigh)
‘Being’ should read ‘been’ ah the joys of spellcheckers. Correct spelling, wrong word.
Hence
“It & other public space agencies have put hundreds of other people, men and women, (no children yet though! ) incl. the occasional space tourist into orbit – & been doing so since the 1960’s”.
& likewise ‘Instances’ should be ‘interests’ :
“Space travel, & space-based scientific research is beyond the bounds of narrow commercial interests and requires government involvement by necessity.”
and then there are spacing issues with a couple of last minute additions like where it should read :
OTOH Private space agencies build a scientific observatory where data is, y’know shared by scientists globally? .. Hahahhahaa! Gawd No!! Never.
& there’s also capitalisation irregularities tocorrect getting it to read correctly :
“Private industry, the multinational corporations are by their nature intrinsically unsuited to running broad-based, public-national-&-international-good, long-term space programs.”
and more bold isneeded where there’s the bit with what I reckon NASA needs to really take off itself :
”
I) Proper funding …
II) Proper visionary leadership …
&
III) Proper focus
& now it’s mostly right – or would be if I could make such changes where there’re needed!
Grumble
Hmm .. adn what’s the bet thre’ll be something going wrong with this post too and that will also be uncorrektable in the post istelf .. argh … !
September 24th, 2008 at 9:25 am
For Freyas sake! I knew it!
—–
Make that more like :
“While NASA, in particular, regularly comes in for what is really pretty unfair and ungrateful criticism here, lets never forget how good it has been and what a remarkable and unparalleled record of success NASA (incl. JPL) can boast having :
1. Put 12 men (& sadly so far only men) on the lunar surface. …
2. Launched spaceprobes to every planet. …
3. Built some of the most remarkable pieces of engineering in human history. …
4.Launched and run the Hubble Space Telescope, the Fermi Gamma –ray Observatory, the IRAS infra-red, Uhuru X-ray and many other space observatories …
&
5. NASA have worked in partnership with other nations and institutions and has helped to construct an atmosphere of international co-operation and peace …”
Wonder if this’ll finally work???
(Testing something with bolding and continuing lines in bold ..)
September 24th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Yes! It works!
I see now .. you need html (Is it?) tags greater than ‘b’ lesser than ‘b’ after every Freya’s-allmighty flipping line you want bolded.
Hope that helps somebody else out – a bit late for me!
Or a bit clock-wise early for me too at around 1.30 am Adelaide time .. That’s all for t’night from me folks!
September 24th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Note: Was “SnakeHandler” but I thought the new alias better suits my pessimistic personality.
NASA has a lot to be proud of but the glory days of Sputnik through Apollo are long behind us. To be blunt, the old model does not work anymore and will not work in the future. The Russians could land on Pluto via an Imperial Star Cruiser and it wouldn’t make any difference. The money is not there is Congress to do anything approaching an Apollo re-run. The truth is we’re never going to get beyond low earth orbit at this rate. And while I appreciate and respect NASA’s success with probes, that success has been mixed at best and only a fool or a person who was suicidal would ride on the Shuttle post-2010 (should it come to that). As we now know, it actually wasn’t that smart of an idea to ride on the Shuttle post-1981.
Disasters are how bureaucracies correct themselves. It is the only accounting system they know. Right now we are in a heck of an economic mess and there are a lot of bad investments out there waiting to be sold at a loss. Scientists like everyone else have to choose among scarce resources for competing ends and economic reality is merciless. The space station, for example, was not a big scientific bang for the buck and if I were a betting man (given the situation in/with Russia), I would say it is going the way of MIR in a few years. In short, NASA is not an efficient enterprise and it is unable to correct itself. Time to have a fire sale and move on.
There are better ways to do this. Let the market find them.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Now, I’m not well versed in this, but how many failures did NASA have before they got a working rocket? How many flights did they do before putting people on their rockets? How long did it take them before they delivered satellites into higher orbits?
This is a equally silly arguement. What NASA did 40+ years ago was on the cutting edge, bleeding edge even. Space X is building on NASA’s shoulders.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am
@PaulW
I just took a quick look at Space X’s web site and noticed that they aren’t really building on NASA’s shoulders. Their rockets are not simply updated versions of existing designs, but are new ones designed in-house. They are also adding a new innovation – making it a reusable launch vehicle. Now, this might not be the best way to go, but it does bring another variable into the comparison. Also, I would say that the new features they are putting into their designs also puts them on the cutting edge.
IIUC, NASA was using rocketry that had been developed over roughly 10 years before the agency was created. How many new innovations did they include in the first rockets they launched? Of the rockets that were not changed, how many of them failed before NASA’s formation?
I will admit that rocketry itself was quite new when NASA was formed. But to say that NASA has done X amount of stuff in all the decades that it’s been around and then criticize a 6-year-old private company for not doing all those things is, to me, a rather unequal comparison. My comparison may not be the best, but it is, I think, a more accurate questioning than what StevoR was arguing.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:46 am
im very confused, there are more then just NASA and space X, what about atlas and delta, last i checked they were owned by a privet company. and as for space X failing, the above arguments are down right dumb. its like saying that its ok to build an airplane that cant fly because you have never built one before, its just dumb. with what NASA and others have learned about building rockets and launching them in the past umpteen years, you should be able to have a good flight in at least 6 years. they are just being careless and cutting corners to save a few bucks.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Atlas (Lockheed) and Delta (Boeing) are built under government contract. Essentially they’re government subsidised.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:02 am
but space x is getting funding from the government as well so again whats the diff.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7539780.stm
the above article states that nasa is giving them seed money for there falcon 9 rocket
“The demonstration in Texas meets a target laid down by Nasa, which has given SpaceX some “seed” funding. ” (from the article)
ULA, which owns Atlas and Delta, builds rockets that the government buys , and have also sold rockets to privet companies to launch there payloads. so again ULA is a privet company that has a costumer that is the US government, just like space X.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hmm… So the quarter billion dollars awarded to SpaceX through the COTS program doesn’t count as a government subsidy?
September 24th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Thanks for the added info about Atlas and Delta. How long have they been in the rocket-building business? Have they tweaked designs in ways similar to SpaceX? How many failures have they had? How many successes?
September 24th, 2008 at 11:39 am
@Todd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance
September 24th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I for one have been staying up very late watching every single one of SpaceX launches. I wish the luck as I think that competition is great. I am not too keen on their approach to space access (like all current approaches they are not progressive enough for my taste), but its better than nothing.
Yes there is the ULA and there is NASA, but neither has managed to get launch costs as low as SpaceX is claiming to get them. This is what is exciting, not their track record, or where they get their funding from, or what technology they are using. What is exciting is that they are planning on putting a pound of stuff into orbit for less than any of the others does. Thats a first and thats why they should have our support. After all every piece of scientific hardware that we can get into space quicker, cheaper and better is a win for science. I think anyone here will agree on that, right?
September 24th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
@ben
Thanks for the link. So it looks like ULA is using already established rocket designs rather than trying to innovate something new from scratch.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The problem is simple to figure out. Space X needs German scientists like NASA had.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
@ StevoR -
Thanks. Somebody changed html code, because in the past encapsulating commands with [ and ] worked just fine.
Anyway, imho, as long as capitalism is balanced by labor and service unions, it works just fine. That’s why we need international unions for international corporate cartels.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:45 am
@Todd
I just took a quick look at Space X’s web site and noticed that they aren’t really building on NASA’s shoulders. Their rockets are not simply updated versions of existing designs, but are new ones designed in-house. They are also adding a new innovation – making it a reusable launch vehicle. Now, this might not be the best way to go, but it does bring another variable into the comparison. Also, I would say that the new features they are putting into their designs also puts them on the cutting edge.
So in a bit over 20 mins (assuming you saw my post as soon as it listed) you can compair the design of Space X to NASA and figure out that this is a totally new design not reuseing anything NASA did? Sry, I’m not believing that.
Even so, you are missing the point. Yes, they are building on NASA shoulders, even if the design is 100% unique.
Example, The iphone may be a 100% unique phone, but the only reason it can be built ‘easily’ today is due to all the phones and lessons learned before it. The same is true for Space X, the only reason they can build this rocket quickly is due to all the other rockets shot before it. So to compair NASA mistakes to Space X is just darn silly when NASA had next to nothing to learn off of.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:20 am
@PaulW
Fair enough. I wasn’t necessarily commenting on the more basic design of the rocket, but rather on more specialized design changes which may be playing the larger role in their failures. True, I only did a rather cursory review and don’t know the details of their designs and engineering model. That said, though, my criticism of StevoR’s comparisons, I think, still stands. Let me paraphrase his arguments:
Jane, who has been playing tennis for 25 years, has played in hundreds of matches all over the world.
My neighbor Joe, who started playing tennis 2 years ago, has only played a few dozen matches, not one of which has been on a major court.
Jane has had an ace serve on every court she’s played on.
My neighbor Joe has never had an ace serve.
Jane has made some of the most amazing and astounding plays ever seen in the history of tennis.
My neighbor Joe hasn’t. Ever.
Jane has played against dozens of world-class tennis players.
My neighbor Joe (who we might remember, just started playing 2 years ago) hasn’t played anyone outside his tennis club.
Jane has played with and against people from all around the world in a spirit of cooperation and sporting competition.
Me neighbor Joe, again, has only played people within his tennis club, but he’s a pretty friendly guy and would probably love to play with and against people from all over the world, if given the opportunity.
Now, once Joe has had a good bit more experience and training under his belt, those comparisons would be a bit more valid. Now, I admit that this isn’t the best analogy, but I think it highlights the flaws in StevoR’s comparisons.
Is SpaceX doing the best possible job they could do? Maybe not. Is their performance reason enough to condemn private space exploration or to say that government programs are better than private endeavors? No. Unfortunately, private programs like SpaceX don’t have a very long history, and to condemn the entire concept based on one company is at best premature.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
” RL Says:
September 24th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The problem is simple to figure out. Space X needs German scientists like NASA had.
LMAO… good point.
Someone put in a call to Berlin, quick!
September 27th, 2008 at 11:36 am
First I would like to point out that none of you really know what you are talking about. So, let’s just sit back and enjoy the fireworks on on the 28th!
September 28th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
According to their web site (no time travel involved?
, they made it. 4th flight of the Falcon 1 worked perfectly. I missed it, though. Kept checking the “updates” page, looking for some announcement that they were about to launch with a link to get the live feed, but it just had yesterday’s announcement that they were going to try to launch today. Then I re-read the fine print and it said to go to the main http://www.spacex.com page to see the webcast… Did so and the page says “The live webcast has ended. Launch successful!” Apparently they launched it about 3 hours ago.
Way to go, space-x!