Yes, this moves just like the space station and all the satellites and the moon, LaGrangian point clusters, and dropped wrenches, a shuttle every now and then, and tether cords. Yes just EXACTLY like them all.

So glad we added clarity to this, and value. Let’s don’t even mention value. When we are “Officially in Charge of Truth” – it is all just so easy isn’t it?

Now when the Russians had a solid rocket booster do this on Dec 9, they claimed it was all A-OK – this is how it is supposed to work. Then said, ‘whoops we lied.’

But of course, to raise ANY objection at all to your wisdom means that I am being kidnapped by aliens and taking homeopathic sleeping pills with Psychics and Leprechauns. Another clarity about myself that you helped bring me of Official in Charge of Truth.

But, agent 51, you have not established that. All you have is conjectured that notion, but it does not fit the observations, which clearly show a spiral vapor trail left by the outgassing exhaust of a spinning rocket following a standard ballistic flight.

Or perhaps you actually have some sort of evidence to back up your conjecture, including how, exactly, a Russian ICBM would end up flying almost due east over Australia?

In other words, SpaceX basher tactic no 24c: downplaying by screaming “we want new shiny tech, not old bunk”. Please, mention something about 1964 and we all will be set.

No, the missle is not “spiraling like a cork screw”. It is simply spinning around its central axis. The gas ejecting from the booster is expanding out from the rocket as it spins, creating the “corkscrew” shape that you are confusing with the path of the rocket. The rocket itself is on a simple, arced trajectory right in the middle of that corkscrew.

Simple, yes?

That makes no sense. The rockets aren’t “spiraling.” The exhaust is spiraling. The rocket is just spinning.

“SSTO? Really? That’s your answer for delivering personnel and cargo to LEO? I guess we don’t have to be realistic.
”

LH2/LOX SSTO was Chrysler’s shuttle proposal from 1972! They should have gotten the contract—they could have built it. The flyboys insisted on something that could land like an airplane so they could pretend they were “flying” a Mach-25 fighter.

Paul D. @ 40:

Yeah, but the weight of the tankage could be reduced astronomically if we absorbed the lesson of the original Atlas from 55 years ago, with tanks that were nothing but balloons that couldn’t stand up under their own weight without internal pressure. Let gasses handle the compression loads; tensile strength is much easier to come by. Von Braun insisted on building everything like an ocean liner (out of steel, mostly) and we’ve been going backwards ever since.

It works. It’s cheap. It’s reliable. It’s a known quantity. Those are all great things for a rocket company, especially one breaking into a new market.

You’ve yet to offer anything objective as to why something new and whiz bang is needed and why the KISS method isn’t satisfactory. You’re arguing with your opinion, but nothing objective is coming of that. You’ll note that SpaceX got one of the two COTS contracts. Did you not submit your designs for COTS?

New for new’s sake is just fashion. It’s not an engineering principle, nor is it a quality of good design.

I’ll add +1 to what Paul D (40) said.

Lastly, if you’re looking for something to reduce the cost of getting a payload into LEO by 100x or 1000x….well, keep waiting. That’s quite a ways off. If COTS had that as a requirement, we’d have to rely completely on the Russians for ISS resupply for a very long time.

SSTO? Really? That’s your answer for delivering personnel and cargo to LEO? I guess we don’t have to be realistic.

Battleaxe, you could be correct about the post-SECO roll being caused by excess LOX or propellant boiling off and venting either through the turbopump/roll-control nozzle or perhaps through the main engine. Or maybe through pressure relief valves in the main tanks.

I don’t know if they are planning to provide secondary or backup roll control with the Draco thrusters (Go Slytherin!), which weren’t present on this flight (boiler-plate Dragon), but if so, what do they do when they’re launching something other than a Dragon (comsat, etc.)? On the other hand, I vaguely remember they were planning to install a set of Draco thrusters directly on the 2nd stage, to provide stabilization between and during main engine burns. I don’t recall hearing any mention of that during or after this launch.

As for re-inventing the wheel, how often do cars break down during the Indy 500? This is like building a new car, complete with engine, from scratch, and entering it in the Indy 500 without being able to test it before hand. They should be (and are) happy just to finish!

I believe the Falcon 9 is significantly cheaper than comparable US rockets. Cost is an inherent part of engineering, just as important as performance and reliability.

And the hydrogen vs. kerosene question is not at all obvious. Yes, hydrogen gives you higher specific impulse. It also gives you a much lower mean propellant density. Since tank mass scales with volume (and engine pump mass and required power scale with volumetric flow rate), low density is bad for the overall vehicle design.

Compare the Atlas V and Falcon 9, which use LOX/RP-1, vs. the Delta 4, which uses LOX/LH2. The tanks on the latter are much larger.

Kerosene is fine for the first stage.

“For Space X, kerosene gets the job done and is cheaper than LH2 and much easier to handle. What’s wrong with that? ”

What’s wrong with that is that for the second stage you need a much higher specific impulse. What’s needed is an aluminum S IV-B stage, except using that Russian engine we prevented them from selling to India that delivers a vacuum specific impulse of 470. We bought Russian engines for the Atlas V, why not?

You continue to completely miss my point. which is: systems with the same performance and cost as the Falcon 9 already exist, and have for 50 years. Why reinvent them? We need NEW technology. Technology that will not reduce the cost of putting a pound of payload into LEO by a factor of 2, but by a factor of 100 or 1000. That’s going to mean completely reusable spacecraft, maybe SSTO, maybe not (but it is very expensive to go and fish these things out of the drink and bring them back to the launch site.)

As for what they’ll do “later”, you’ve got to be kidding. The sub-glacial pace of advancement in the fast-moving “Space Age™” means that whatever they come up with now is what we’re stuck with for the next 50 years. If not 100!

Your claims about what NASA should have done don’t have any supporting proof.

Saturn 1 class: that metric doesn’t matter. What matters is cost per unit mass to get payloads–hardware or people–to orbit. Given that, the Falcon 9 isn’t crippled at all: it’s designed to perform its mission at a given cost. It’s on pace to do that. As for Kerosene as a fuel, it was shown long ago that for liquid fuel rockets, in the first stage or two, that kerosene vs. LH2 is a wash in terms of performance metrics. For Space X, kerosene gets the job done and is cheaper than LH2 and much easier to handle. What’s wrong with that? From an engineering perspective, doing something because its “new” or “novel” or not “reinventing the wheel” is bad design if that new thing doesn’t meet the performance specs, in terms of physical performance, cost performance, and safety. So far, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, et al are meeting their design specs. You haven’t offered a single compelling reason for doing things any differently for LEO missions.

Perhaps you should also keep in mind that nothing prevents any of these companies from employing new, more efficient, less expensive technologies later. Since you can’t see the future, we’ll just have to wait to see what happens.

Innovation, new ideas, and slick new wheels will be part of and have to be part of any system that takes men beyond the Moon to Mars, asteroids, or where ever.

Wow! is this backwards day? At 25 you just repeated exactly what I said. They control roll with that tangential exhaust pipe, not gimballing. They stopped controlling it when the engine was shut down, the pipe was still outgassing, so the stage rolled.

At 27, again you’re saying just what I said. All this fantastic work has already been done. The workhorse Delta II and IIIs (That is, Thrust-Augmented-Thor Deltas) use a main engine as old as the small-block Chevy V8. Most of our space launchers date back to the late 50s and early 60s or are slight updates of those boosters. There have been attempts to move forward, but they’ve all been either canceled, or are abject failures. (The Space Shuttle.)

All I hear in the press is that this is a new era of innovation now that the stifling hand of the evil gummint is off everybody’s neck. this is BS. Private contractors did all the work then, too. That work has been done. these systems are available. The Falcon 9 is absolutely reinventing the wheel. If NASA had actually built the totally reusable two-stage shuttle they planned on, or better yet, chosen the Chrysler design (SSTO H2-LOX Apollo command-module-shaped vertical-lander with aerospike nozzle) we would be in much better shape now.

A Saturn I-class vehicle that can’t carry anything like the payload of the Saturn I because it’s crippled with a kerosene-fueled second stage already exists. It’s called Soyuz. What is the point of duplicating the boosters of 50 years ago? We need to move forward, not back. SpaceX and all these other companies are not interested in advancing the state of the art, they just want each launch to continue to cost tens of millions of dollars.

OK, Mr. Smartypants Sciency Guy. You can’t “prove” this was a rocket booster. Did you fly up there and take a picture? Can we see markings to indicate its origin? Do we even have a picture detailed enough to show the shape of the object? No, no, and no.
A good scientist does not jump to conclusions. Without conclusive data, this is still a UFO. Without evidence, we must classify this as an unsolved mystery. Without proof, it’s either alien or terrestrial. It’s a 50/50 chance, so it lends as much support to the alien hypothesis as it does to your shoddy science.

Yeah, right(!). So, according to your reasoning, whenever police divers recover a human corpse wearing a concrete ‘overcoat’ at the bottom of a lake, the police and the forensic scientists should “not jump to conclusions” and assume that it was a murder carried out by the local Mafia; instead, “[w]ithout evidence, we must classify this as an unsolved mystery”, because “[w]ithout proof, it’s either [murder] or [suicide]”. Therefore, “[i]t’s a 50/50 chance, so it lends as much support to the [suicide] hypothesis as it does to [forensic] shoddy science.”

You left out the other possibility, which is that it is an application of alien technology by terrestrial (and seekrit) government agencies.

So, the odds are really more like 50/50/50. Do the math.

/leaving tongue in cheek (woohoo!)