101–110 of 444 posts
Lots of eggs in this basket.
Yay! Successful egg deployment, as well as perfect basket landing :-) I can't stop smiling!
"Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" Oy... someone needs to tell Bezos it's a whole different scale than what he did. https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067
He knows, but the public doesn't and he can say what he wants to twist the perception in his favor and give the impression that the feats were equally challenging. Not to remove any merit to Blue Origin's achievement, but it's nowhere near what SpaceX just pulled off.
I must have missed it, but can anyone explain why Orbcomm wants 11 satellites in the same orbit? The stage 2 engine isn't firing in between letting the satellites go.
Leo, they are so low they don't cover a whole lot of territory. The oribits may be at slightly different altitudes simply because of the inertia of the second stage, I really should have monitored that altitude indicator during the releases, were they identical?
I went back and recorded the release speed (km/hr), altitude (km) for each drop:
25960 626
25954 627
25950 628
25944 630
25937 632
25935 632
A circular orbit at that height is about 29000 km around; 25 km/hour of difference between release 1 and 6 would give them a separation of 6 degrees longitude/day, or ~50 days until the faster satellites 'lap' the slowest one.
Not any sort of rocket scientist, but I gather the strategy with these kind of LEO satellites is to just throw a pile of them up there semi-randomly, and count on at least one being in the neighborhood when you want to talk to it.
edit: Last paragraph is wrong. See my comment two levels down for the answer.
AMAZING THEY DID IT :) hah! Tears in my eyes here this is absolutely incredible to watch. I stayed up for this, I hope I didn't wake up the neighbours and it will take days to wipe the grin of my face.
EDIT: To quote my friend's reaction,
"HAPPY FEET, WOMBO COMBO!
Let's Kerbal the shit out of Space."
(Becomes clear 25~ seconds in)
"Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" Oy... someone needs to tell Bezos it's a whole different scale than what he did. https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067
"Welcome to the club"? Wow, that was classless. What Blue Origin did was impressive, but it was utterly trivial compared to what just happened with this flight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leo, they are so low they don't cover a whole lot of territory. The oribits may be at slightly different altitudes simply because of the inertia of the second stage, I really should have monitored that altitude indicator during the releases, were they identical?
Maybe there was a secondary thruster somewhere to provide some separation. I went back and recorded the release speed (km/hr), altitude (km) for each drop: 25960 626 25954 627 25950 628 25944 630 25937 632 25935 632 A circular orbit at that height is about 29000 km around; 25 km/hour of difference between release 1 and 6 would give them a separation of 6 degrees longitude/day, or ~50 days until the faster satellites…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.space.com/21386-spacex-reusable-rockets-cost.html ~75%.
The money quote: > Musk said that a rocket's first stage accounts for three-quarters of its total price tag, so a vehicle with a reusable first stage can be produced at far less cost — assuming the hardware is fully and rapidly reusable. ~75% savings seems like a "best case scenario" number.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely amazing! I'm sure I heard a "holy shit" or two there in the audience. :) EDIT: One question for the rocket scientists here: exactly how reusable do they expect these returned first stage rockets to be? What is the process of certifying that a returned rocket is fit to fly, and what components are most likely to need repairing/replacing with each launch?
NARS but probably comparable to shuttle engines and body.