The Falcon Heavy rocket made its fifth launch in five years on Sunday evening from Florida. However, this was the first launch of the triple-core booster in twilight, and this rare evening light provided some spectacular new insights into the liftoff and return of the rocket. //

Here's a highly compressed 1080p preview of my footage. This is easily the best launch footage I have ever captured, stay tuned for the full launch to landing in 4K!

I used to regret coming into this world mere months after the final Apollo mission, thinking I had missed the great age of exploration. But I no longer do. In just the last six months, I have seen the launch of the two most powerful rockets ever built, the Space Launch System and Starship. I have seen the naming of not one but two crews that will fly around the Moon, Artemis II and the dearMoon project. As NASA says, we are going.

Yet still more remarkably, during the last half-year, I have seen two dozen rockets land on a drone ship and fly again. We no longer treat this as remarkable, but we absolutely should. These now-routine Falcon 9 first stage landings at sea are a harbinger of the future. //

This is a far more wonderful and wild time in space than any that came before. There is incredible opportunity and peril. The future is unknowable but tantalizing.

So I no longer have any regrets about missing Apollo. I am thrilled to be alive at this very moment in human history. //

pokrface Senior Technology Editor

ARS STAFF

Re: the ubiquity of reusability — when I'm doing Saturn V tour shifts, one of the most common questions people ask is whether the giant Saturn V they're standing next to ever flew, and how NASA recovered it. I would guess that out of everyone who asks a question about the rocket, 50% of them ask that one in particular. When I tell them that no, the Saturn V was a one-and-done thing and most of it was destroyed during launch, most folks are genuinely flabbergasted.

SpaceX has gotten so good at reusable rocketry that it's almost unbelievable. It's similarly unbelievable how quickly the idea of rockets that return and land on their own has become nor just normalized, but the expected way things are supposed to work.

Like Berger says, that's one of the most amazing shifts in perspective I've ever seen in my entire life.

One of the most iconic launch sites in the world, Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6), will be leased by SpaceX. Confirmation came after Col. Rob Long, Space Launch Delta 30 (SLD 30) commander, signed a statement supporting SpaceX’s lease to launch Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions from the launch site.

While Thursday’s inaugural flight of Starship brought excitement, incredible images, and a roar to South Texas, it also tossed concrete miles away (and at vans). Numerous leaked images, aerial photos, and ocean-based photos have revealed the extensive damage to Stage 0. Everything you need to see has been compiled into one article.

Yesterday I wrote about the first launch of Space X’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. There was one particular clip which seemed to show a bunch of debris flying at the camera as the rocket was lifting off. Here’s the clip.

Salat did not immediately realize that he was witnessing a “SpaceX Spiral.” As noted by SpaceWeather, three hours earlier SpaceX launched 51 small satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base some 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away. //

An all-sky camera at the University of Alaska’s Poker Flat Research Range also captured the strange whirlpool on Saturday evening. //

SpaceX rockets are designed to land back on Earth but the second stage of the Falcon 9 does not parachute down to the ground. Instead, it burns up in the atmosphere but before doing so it vents its unused fuel which will often take the form of a stunning spiral. //

“I will say I loved the wonderment of not knowing what it was. The auroras kept on dancing so it was hours before I had time to research and try figuring out this unique phenomenon I had witnessed.

“Those were the best hours of blissful bewilderment.”

A little more than seven years have passed since the Falcon 9 rocket made its first successful landing back on Earth. That was just SpaceX's 20th launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. Monday morning's launch was the 207th overall flight of the rocket. For a time, after that first landing, SpaceX had several misses as it continued to experiment with landing on a drone ship, as well as enduring a few mishaps.

However, since a drone ship landing failure in February 2021, SpaceX had reeled off 100 consecutive successful booster landings. Monday morning's return made for lucky no. 101.

In 2022, SpaceX launched 61 missions into orbit, breaking the company’s previous record of 31 missions set in 2021. So far in 2023, the company is on pace to break its own record again. Based on the launch cadence achieved in January and early February, SpaceX could easily pass the 80-launch mark this year. //

With the launch of Starlink Group 5-4, liftoff occurred five days, three hours, and 38 minutes after the Amazonas Nexus mission. This breaks SpaceX’s previous pad turnaround record which was also set at SLC-40, with just five days, nine hours, and 28 minutes between Hotbird-13F and Starlink Group 4-36 in October 2022.

Caught the Falcon Heavy second stage separation and ignition on my flight. We were over the Turks and Caicos Islands at 34,000’. One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

You really shouldn't miss the images of the booster return.

by Eric Berger - Jan 16, 2023 1:14pm EST

The Falcon Heavy rocket made its fifth launch in five years on Sunday evening from Florida. However, this was the first launch of the triple-core booster in twilight, and this rare evening light provided some spectacular new insights into the liftoff and return of the rocket. //

Now the second-most powerful rocket in the world after NASA's Space Launch System, the Falcon Heavy always puts on a great show, with its 27 Merlin engines firing at once. It holds the record for the rocket with the most first-stage engines to reach orbit—at least, it will until SpaceX's Starship rocket flies later this year.

for me the news of the week is that SpaceX not only launched a Falcon Heavy rocket, but two other Falcon 9 missions on separate coasts as well in just five days. The operational challenges of this are immense and, I think, underappreciated outside of people directly involved in this kind of work. //

SpaceX approaches ludicrous cadence. In the movie Space Balls, "ludicrous speed" is the velocity attained by a spaceship traveling much faster than the speed of light. That is the velocity of cadence SpaceX is now approaching with its Falcon family of rockets. On Thursday morning, the company launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 51 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This was the company's fifth launch of 2023.

If you're keeping track at home ... As of January 19, SpaceX has launched a rocket every 3.8 days during this calendar year. Extrapolated out to a full year, SpaceX is on pace for 96 Falcon launches in 2023. While that probably won't happen, it indicates that SpaceX founder Elon Musk's prediction of 100 orbital launches this year was not all that, ahem, ludicrous.

On September 22, 2022 NASA and SpaceX announced that they were investigating the possibility of using a Dragon spacecraft—of the kind used to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station—to go visit Hubble. On Dec. 22 NASA issued a request for other commercial space companies to get involved. //

The idea is that Hubble could be boosted to a higher orbit to continue its work for many more years. There’s also the tantalising prospect that it could also be serviced and refurbished—and its optics improved. //

A general servicing would be crucial because whether or not Hubble avoids re-entry this decade it is getting old. Launched in 1990 and last serviced by a space shuttle crew in 2009, it’s beginning to have technical problems. The latest was in July 2021 when it spent a month out of action because its payload computer failed before the problem was fixed.

However, from a science point of view an upgrade to its optics would be a game-changer. The reflecting telescope has a 2.4 meter mirror that can’t be upgraded, but its cameras could be. //

If the feasibility studies suggests it’s a go-er it would be the sixth time Hubble has been visited since its launch from Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. //

Almost immediately after its launch it was discovered that its mirror had an aberration causing images to be blurry, so it was visited in orbit by astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993. They installed corrective optics. More servicing missions took place in 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009 to upgrade various components, notably adding the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Hubble now has six cameras and sensors to gather data on and take spectacular images of deep sky targets previously beyond the reach of astronomers. There are larger ground-based telescopes, but their view of the cosmos is limited by Earth’s atmosphere, which blocks infrared and ultraviolet light.

Hubble remains valuable to astronomers—and continues to make incredible observations—because it sees the universe in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. The new James Webb Space Telescope deals only in near and far-infrared light. Since Webb orbits the Sun a million miles from Earth it can likely never be serviced—despite repeated strikes by micrometeoroids already.

There are also valid concerns about the safety of the SLS and Orion hardware. These vehicles are large, complex machines that will only fly infrequently, at most once a year. At such a flight rate, this launch system will always be experimental.

It can reasonably be argued that Starship is also not safe to launch on and land back on Earth. It, too, is a large and complex vehicle that will come back through Earth's atmosphere, dissipate heat, and perform delicate maneuvers before landing under the power of its own engines. Even though Starship will launch at least dozens of times per year, the vehicle is unlikely to meet NASA's safety requirements for humans for a long, long time. So Starship-only missions to the Moon are not a near-term solution.

Something even the prophet cannot predict
However, there is an alternative, the source suggested. NASA presently has a vehicle it has deemed safe enough to launch humans into space and back. That's SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, which launches on the rocket that owns the world record for the longest streak of successful launches—the Falcon 9. By the mid-2020s, Crew Dragon will already have launched humans into space dozens of times.

The safest and lowest-cost means of completing an Artemis mission to the Moon, therefore, may involve four astronauts launching to a fairly high altitude in low-Earth orbit on Crew Dragon and rendezvousing with a fully fueled Starship. The astronauts would then fly to the Moon, land, and come back to rendezvous with Crew Dragon in Earth orbit. They would then splash down on Earth inside Dragon.

This architecture is less risky because it doesn't involve launching on SLS, nor does it require two rendezvous and dockings in lunar orbit, far from Earth. The crew would only spend a couple of more days aboard Starship than they would during the existing Artemis III plan, so Starship life support should be up to the task. If you care about costs, this plan also excludes the $4.1 billion launch cost of Orion and the SLS rocket and substitutes Crew Dragon, which would be on the order of one-twentieth of the cost.

NASA confirmed Wednesday that it has awarded five additional crew transportation missions to SpaceX, and its Crew Dragon vehicle, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. This brings to 14 the total number of crewed missions that SpaceX is contracted to fly for NASA through 2030.

As previously reported by Ars, these are likely the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. While there are no international agreements yet signed, NASA has signaled that it would like to continue flying the orbiting laboratory until 2030, by which time one or more US commercial space stations should be operational in low Earth orbit.

Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station. That would be enough to fill all of NASA's needs, which include two launches a year, carrying four astronauts each. But NASA has an option to buy more seats from either provider. //

SpaceX started flying operational missions to the space station in 2020, with the Crew-1 mission. Although Boeing's Starliner has a crewed test flight early next year, likely in February, its first operational mission will not come before the second half of 2023.

Additionally, there is some question about the availability of rockets for Starliner. Boeing has purchased enough Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance for six operational Starliner missions, but after that the Atlas V will be retired. During a news conference last week, Boeing's program manager for commercial crew, Mark Nappi, said the company is looking at "different options" for Starliner launch vehicles. These options include buying a Falcon 9 from a competitor, SpaceX, paying United Launch Alliance to human-rate its new Vulcan rocket, or paying Blue Origin for its forthcoming New Glenn booster. //

Since we now know how many flights each company will be providing NASA through the lifetime of the International Space Station, and the full cost of those contracts, we can break down the price NASA is paying each company per seat by amortizing the development costs.

Boeing, in flying 24 astronauts, has a per-seat price of $183 million. SpaceX, in flying 56 astronauts during the same time frame, has a seat price of $88 million. Thus, NASA is paying Boeing 2.1 times the price per seat that it is paying SpaceX, inclusive of development costs incurred by NASA. //

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ColdWetDog wrote:
Interesting that the $90 million lasts charged by Roscosmos isn't too far off the SpaceX cost.

The Russians were seen to be price gouging - and in a way that's true, the Soyuz development costs have been paid back years ago - but it wasn't too outrageous of a price in retrospect.

Of course, giving the money to SpaceX has many other advantages.

It's not a good comparison regarding Roscosmos seat price because the SpaceX "seat price" actually includes the complete capacity of the Dragon and it's trunk for cargo up mass and down mass.

“We’ve got more than 11,000 Starlink stations and they help us in our everyday fight on all the fronts,” Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov told Politico. “We’re ready, even if there is no light, no fixed internet, through generators using Starlink, to renew any connection in Ukraine.” //

In April, a Ukrainian solider identified as “Dima” told journalist David Patrikarakos that the service was playing a key role in the resistance.

“I want to say one thing: @elonmusk’s Starlink is what changed the war in #Ukraine’s favor. #Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire,” the soldier said, according to Patrikarakos’ Twitter thread detailing their interview.

Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.

Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable." With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.

Later in the hearing, Martin broke down the costs per flight, which will apply to at least the first four launches of the Artemis program: $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, $568 million for ground systems, $1 billion for an Orion spacecraft, and $300 million to the European Space Agency for Orion's Service Module. NASA, Martin said, had checked and confirmed these figures.

What is striking about these costs is that they do not include the tens of billions of dollars that NASA has already spent developing the Orion spacecraft since 2005 and the Space Launch System rocket since 2011. If one were to amortize development costs over 10 flights of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the $4.1 billion figure cited by Martin would easily double. //

Later during the hearing, US Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), asked whether the incremental costs of flying more than one Artemis mission a year would bring the cost down. Martin said he did not know for sure. Moreover, NASA is not planning to fly more than one Artemis mission a year, so the question is somewhat moot.

Martin, however, appeared to doubt that there would be significant cost savings due to the inefficiency of the program and its large aerospace contractors.

"Part of it goes to the efficiencies of the underlying contractors, like Boeing," Martin said. "One of the problems we saw in development of the SLS and Orion—it's a challenging development of course—but we did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing's part, poor planning, and poor execution."

Then, unprompted, Martin continued to criticize the programs set up by Congress to fund the rocket and spacecraft. House and Senate members told NASA to use "cost-plus" contracts, which ensure that companies involved in the development and operation of these systems receive all of their costs, plus a fee. This tends to disincentivize timely work completed within a set budget. (Remarkably, NASA was told to continue using cost-plus contracts even after the development program.)

"We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using to develop that combined SLS-Orion system worked to the contractors' rather than NASA's advantage," Martin said. //

In reality, no one should expect Congress to care about the high cost of the SLS and Orion program. The legislature created the programs this way. //

In fact, key members of Congress have been critical of NASA every time the agency has tried to break free of cost-plus contracting and use a more commercial approach through fixed-price contracts. That congressional skepticism has persisted even as the commercial approach has borne fruit. As tensions with Russia rise, for instance, NASA only has independent access to space because of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Lest anyone doubt this, House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) took aim at NASA's commercial space efforts in her opening statement at the hearing. The context of her statement concerns NASA's desire to purchase commercial services for spaceflight in the future rather than oversee their development in-house like it did with SLS and Orion.

"I find the sum of these actions to be very troubling," Johnson said. "And it raises the question of whether NASA will even retain the capabilities and workforce within the agency that will be needed to get US astronauts to Mars if all of these privatization plans are realized."

At least it answers the question of where congressional priorities lie.

Musk steps to the plate with essential tech support for assets threatened by Russia after its invasion didn’t go as swiftly as originally planned.

Aug 5, 2015

From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth
A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.

The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

It's probable that the impact object comes from a Chinese rocket launched in 2014. //

It was engineer Jon Giorgini at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who realized this object was not, in fact, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. He wrote to Gray on Saturday morning explaining that the DSCOVR spacecraft's trajectory did not go particularly close to the Moon. The second stage would, therefore, be extremely unlikely to strike the Moon. This prompted Gray to dig back into his data and identify other potential candidates.

He soon found one: the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission launched in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket. This lunar mission sent a small spacecraft to the Moon as a precursor test for an eventual lunar-sample return mission. The launch time and lunar trajectory are almost an exact match for the orbit of the object that will hit the Moon in March.

"In a sense, this remains 'circumstantial' evidence," Gray wrote. "But I would regard it as fairly convincing evidence. So I am persuaded that the object about to hit the moon on 2022 Mar 4 at 12:25 UTC is actually the Chang'e 5-T1 rocket stage."

As SpaceX charges forward with full and rapid rocket reuse, the company's stretch goal is to fly each "ship" every six to eight hours. These "ships" are the Starship launch system's upper stage, which is 50 meters tall and designed to carry payloads into orbit or be refilled there to fly to the Moon or Mars. The first-stage "booster" could fly even more frequently, as much as once an hour, he predicted. The first stage makes a six-minute flight to space and back and is intended to be loaded with propellant on the ground in just 30 minutes. //

SpaceX has unquestionably come a long way since 2016, when Musk first revealed the full scope of his plans to build a launch system that could establish a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. By his own estimates, such a venture would require 1 million tons of food, water, and construction materials. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the red planet, and manufacturing consumer products will require a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials.

This is an incredible logistical challenge. Consider that throughout the last five decades, during the entirety of its Mars exploration program, NASA has landed a grand total of a couple of tons on the surface of Mars.

For his settlement plan, therefore, Musk proposed an unprecedented rocket and spacecraft. During a 90-minute speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, five years ago, Musk spoke of his “Interplanetary Transportation System,” or ITS. This was a huge and fully reusable launch system with a second-stage spaceship that could be fueled in low Earth orbit and then flown to Mars fully laden with supplies or dozens of settlers. Eventually, after more name changes, the ship would be christened Starship.

The 2016 speech was striking in its candor. Musk laid bare his entire vision for the first time for all the world to see. It was easy to criticize, and many did. The general viewpoint among the established space community at the time was that such a vision was preposterous.

And who could blame the critics? Only four weeks before Musk gave his speech, SpaceX had blown up its second Falcon 9 rocket in a year, losing the Amos-6 satellite on the launch pad on September 1. The company was also going to be years late delivering a Crew Dragon capability to NASA and its astronauts. And for all the talk of reusable rockets, SpaceX had not yet re-flown a single Falcon 9 rocket. Critics watched the Guadalajara speech and saw Musk the Charlatan—over-promising, grasping for government money, and spewing lies about the future when he couldn’t deliver in the present.

But in the five and a half years since Musk’s first Mars moment, the billionaire has answered those critics. SpaceX has not lost a single rocket since Amos-6. In fact, the Falcon 9 booster recently set the record for the longest streak of successful launches by any rocket ever. SpaceX also has become a reliable provider of crew transportation services to NASA, years ahead of its competitor Boeing, which NASA paid 60 percent more for the same service to low Earth orbit. And Falcon 9 rocket first stages have now flown 11 times, with no end in sight.