Agreement for funding from UAE fell through after Russia invaded Ukraine. //

Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn "Gagarin's Start" into a museum.

The pad is known as Gagarin's Start because it hosted the world's first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

When did spaceflight begin? There is no single answer.

For newcomers to space, the beginning of time can be traced to as recently as December 2015. That's when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the first time, opening the modern era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that came before feels anachronistic.

But for those with a bit more perspective, the dawn of spaceflight can be pushed back further back into time, to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite that shocked the world. This small orbiting spacecraft kicked off the frenetic space race that culminated with NASA's Apollo 11 Moon landing just a dozen years later.

Yet in a new book, From the Earth to Mars, space entrepreneur Jeffrey Manber takes us back much further into the murk of history to divine the origins of spaceflight. His story goes back a century and a half, telling the tales of some figures who are fairly well known, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, and others a bit less so, including Thea von Harbou and Robert Esnault-Pelterie. //

Manber's book is subtitled "Before the Governments were Involved." The second book in the series, he says, will tackle Russian rocket builders. I look forward to it.

abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
764

malor said:
The SLS is just so dumb. It uses the most complex and expensive engines ever built, which justified their cost by being re-usable, straps four of them to a stick, and then throws them in the ocean.

What a pile of crap that design is.

Another contender for 'dumbest design' is ISRO's PSLV. This is a 4 stage rocket that has:
1) The first stage is a a large solid rocket booster
2) Up to six additional strap on (giggity) SRBs, albeit optional - ISRO considers these part of the first stage
2) The second stage is powered by a single 'Vikas' engine that uses hypergolic propellants (UDMH/N2O2)
3) The third stage is another SRB
4) The fourth stage is powered by two engines that use different hypergolic propellants from the second stage(MOH/MMN)

https://arstechnica.com/civis/attachments/pslv_c51_b-jpg.58966/

All very Kerbal. This Rube-Goldberg machine manages to send up to 3800 Kg to LEO, or about 17% the payload of a Falcon 9 without reuse. I get that the rocket is an evolution of previous designs, but why didn't someone at some point not take a step back and ask if maybe a clean sheet approach would be better? 5 separation events, 3 different SRB designs and two completely different liquid stages, sheesh.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December. //

It was SpaceX’s 216th successful mission in a row for the Falcon rocket family, a record unmatched in the history of space launch vehicles.

The booster flown Sunday night, numbered B1058 in SpaceX’s inventory, debuted with the company’s first launch of astronauts in May 2020, sending NASA crew members Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken toward space on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. That mission ended a nearly nine-year gap in US launches carrying astronauts into orbit.

SpaceX’s fleet-leading booster has now launched 801 spacecraft and payloads, plus two astronauts, in more than three years of service. //

SpaceX’s latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket design—called the Block 5—flew for the first time in 2018. At that time, SpaceX had the goal of launching each Falcon 9 Block 5 booster 10 times. With boosters still coming back in good shape after each flight, SpaceX extended the life to 15 launches and landings, according to a report last year by the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The magazine reported that SpaceX put booster components through vibration testing to four times the fatigue life of what they would experience over 15 flights, giving engineers confidence that the rockets will continue to fly successfully. //

SpaceX started the year with the goal of flying 100 missions in 2023, the most flights in a year by any launch provider. SpaceX flew 61 times in 2022. The Falcon 9 continues to be the workhorse for the launch industry as SpaceX tests its much larger Starship vehicle, which engineers designed to eventually be fully reusable with an even faster launch cadence.

But the main limitation of SpaceX’s blistering launch rate is not the availability of flight-ready rockets—it’s the turnaround of the company’s three Falcon 9 launch pads. SpaceX has flown out of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as often as once every five days. The Falcon 9 launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California can be set up for another mission in fewer than 10 days.

Steve Baker
Senior Software Engineer (2013–present)Apr 24

Will SpaceX upgrade Starship to more than three vacuum Raptor engines?

The problem is with the space available.

Although you can fit 33 sea-level Raptors into the 9 meter diameter space at the tail end of the SuperHeavy - the vacuum optimized Raptors need a HUGE engine bell.

Just look at the difference in size (sea-level raptor on the left - vacuum-optimized on the right)…the two engines are almost identical aside from that!

It’s interesting to look at the 1st and 2nd stages of the Falcon-9. It has nine sea-level Merlin engines packed underneath the main rocket - but the second stage has the same diameter - and it’s is pretty much FULL with just one vacuum optimized Merlin!

Same exact rocket motor - but giant bell required for vacuum work.

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
30,072
Terakh said:

let's see the promises actually get delivered on "near" agreed upon time and cost given that some of the stuff don't even exist.

As long as Congress funds the programs on the agreed-upon schedules, I think both landers will be ready before their respective Artemis missions are flown.

Unfortunately, Congress has a history of reducing funding levels below what the delivery time requires then complaining that the programs are delayed. But those sorts of shenanigans only seem to happen to fixed-price contracts where they have no control over where and how the money is spent. The cost-plus rocket contracts seem immune to any sorts of cuts. //

EricBerger Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,067
ARS STAFF
pipe13 said:

...and a large source of energy. You know, to mine the water, collect the CO2, and put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube.

The numbers are pretty sobering: Approximately 750 kilowatts of continuous energy, for two years, to produce 1,000 tons of liquid oxygen and methane. //

RichyRoo Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5y
113
Subscriptor
Hopefully Smarter said:

I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.

without us there is no point to the rest of the universe //

abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
719
Hopefully Smarter said:

I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.

What you call a toxic virus, I call the light of consciousness. We've found no signs of life anywhere in the universe. Life might be incredibly rare, intelligent life rarer still. Taking the first hesitant steps to establishing life off Earth should be a cause for celebration, not miserable cynicism such as yours.

Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA's Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.

This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming. //

The German physicist Max Planck is credited with the notion that science advances only when older practitioners die off, leaving room for new ideas. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn more pithily summarized the sentiment by writing, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Goff offered a variation on this idea for spaceflight: "Space policy seems to progress one congressional retirement at a time," he said.

Like Sowers, he welcomed NASA's entry into an era of reusable spaceflight. But Goff noted that it is really only happening because two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are aggressively pushing the idea forward.

NASA has spent so much over the last decade on the development of the SLS rocket—north of $40 billion, including ground systems—that there has been little money left over for exploration payloads to fly on them. Therefore, when it came time to fund the lunar landers, NASA had to go with the least expensive options. Both Starship and Blue Moon are, roughly, at least $10 billion development programs. But because it can purchase them with fixed-price contracts, NASA is only paying about a third of the overall cost for both, $6.3 billion.

"The only way NASA could really afford to do this was by not doing business as usual," Goff said.

An independent report published Thursday had troubling findings about the money spent by the agency on propulsion for the Space Launch System rocket. Moreover, the report by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin warns that if these costs are not controlled, it could jeopardize plans to return to the Moon. //

"The agency’s reliance on cost-plus awards increases its financial risk," Martin wrote. "In our judgment, NASA has used cost-plus contracting structures for its SLS booster and engine contracts to a greater extent than warranted. Although the SLS is a new vehicle, its heritage boosters and RS-25 engines are well-established."

Cost-plus contracts pay the recipient the total amount of their costs plus a fee. This is in contrast to the fixed-price contracts NASA has given SpaceX and Blue Origin for landers, the design of which is much more experimental and cutting-edge in nature than repurposing space shuttle hardware. //

For example, the current cost of manufacturing a new RS-25 main engine—which will be used for the Artemis V mission and onward—is about $100 million. NASA and Aerojet are trying to achieve a 30 percent cost savings by the end of this decade, bringing the cost down to $70.5 million. //

Compared to the private sector, even getting the cost of an RS-25 engine down to $70.5 million is a preposterously high price. Blue Origin manufactures engines of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.

Based on all of the new data in his latest report, Martin said his office has had to revise its estimate of the total cost of a Space System Launch, inclusive of ground systems and the Orion spacecraft. It is now $4.2 billion.

What exactly is a full-flow closed cycle staged rocket engine like the SpaceX Raptor?

Well, this gets a bit complex, since to understand what the sentence means you have to understand how a rocket engine works. I’m going to try to go from the basics up…

I mean, it’s not like it’s rocket science, right? //

In case you’re wondering, it’s only the third one ever built — really, only the second full engine since the “full-flow power-head demonstrator” never actually had a combustion chamber attached. The other is the Russian RD-270 engine.

It’s also the first full-flow, closed-cycle, dual-shaft, staged-combustion rocket to ever fly. So far, it’s only 20 meters or so, but it did fly. (Update: 12.5 kilometres now…)

So there’s your answer.

"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."

To put this into perspective, the Raptor 2 rocket engine produces approximately 510,000 pounds of thrust. This is almost identical to the amount of thrust produced by the RS-25 engine that will be used to power NASA's Space Launch System rocket. This engine was designed and developed by Rocketdyne in the 1970s for the space shuttle program, and the company has decades of experience manufacturing them. //

In 2015, NASA gave Aerojet Rocketdyne a contract worth $1.16 billion to "restart the production line" for the RS-25 engine. Again, that was money just to reestablish manufacturing facilities, not actually build the engines. NASA is paying more than $100 million for each of those. With this startup funding, the goal was for Aerojet Rocketdyne to produce four of these engines per year.

Kirasich said that as it builds and tests Raptors, SpaceX is rapidly iterating on these processes and producing higher-quality engines.

Elon Musk

·
May 13
@elonmusk
·
Follow
Replying to @elonmusk @NASASpaceflight and @SpaceX
Raptor chamber wall might have the highest heat flux of anything ever made
Chris Bergin - NSF
@NASASpaceflight
·
Follow
Can Raptor 3 can be a drop-in replacement for Raptor 2, or will the vehicles require changes to cater for Raptor 3 engines?

Here's the full firing from the raw pull out of http://nsf.live/mcgregor
1:14 / 1:14
7:29 AM · May 13, 2023 //

Also, Super Heavy is getting very very close to a SRB in terms of thrust density (~1388 vs ~1367kN/m²). Fascinating.

With ~30% higher ISP… meaning ~69% higher power density.

There really is no one close to SX now at making rocket engines. //

I don't want to knock down the SpX engineers working on this thing, if anything, it reminds me of the SSME development. That engine program had its fair share of failures, but, in the end they produced (in my humble opinion) the finest and most reliable rocket engine ever developed (and LH2 powered at that, no small feat), a true pinnacle of U.S. aerospace engineering. Hopefully SpX can rise to that level, because their architecture really needs it. //

Merlin has now exceeded RS-25 in reliability in terms of consecutive successful engines on orbital launch (by about half an order of magnitude). RS-25 had an engine-out on STS-51F on the 19th Shuttle launch, and SpaceX has had more Falcon launches since then without any engines out than the rest of the Shuttle program combined plus had at least 3 times as many engines. (Rs-25 had other hiccups, but I think that’s the only full engine-out? Can’t remember.)

A lot of that Merlin reliability is just the sheer number of engines and number of launches, making more of a difference than any particular feature of the engine, allowing tweaking to improve engine reliability and large manufacturing and test volume that allows quickly achieving really good engine statistics. RS-25 had both clustering and a fairly decent flightrate in its favor, but not as much as Merlin.

V2 has less visible plumbing and wiring, both sea-level versions have the same nozzle exit diameter and similar dimensions, however, V1 has a mass of 2,000 kilograms (kg) and V2 1,600 kg. Raptor V1 generated around 185 tons of thrust and the current V2 generates around 230 tons of thrust. //

This week, the third version of the Raptor engine (V3) reached a new thrust record. “Raptor V3 just achieved 350 bar chamber pressure (269 tons of thrust). Congrats to SpaceX propulsion team!” announced SpaceX founder Elon Musk via Twitter. “Starship Super Heavy Booster has 33 Raptors, so total thrust of 8877 tons or 19.5 million pounds,” he said on May 13. //

As of November 2022, SpaceX completed manufacturing over 200 Raptor engines (and counting) at an average rate of one engine per day. The company manufactures and tests the engines at the McGregor factory. SpaceX officials recently said that they has more engines than they could fly at the moment. SpaceX aims for the cost-per-tonne of thrust of each Raptor to be under $1,000 USD, so a bit over $250,000 at the 260 tons of thrust that each Raptor V3 is capable of generating. Musk said recently that he expects to spend approximately $2 Billion on Starship's development this year

Photos

On Sunday 1/15/23 at 5:56 pm local time, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched a mission for the Space Force, USSF-67. I was able to track one of the boosters from launch at LC-39A to landing at LZ-1. This was filmed with an 11" Celestron NexStar GPS using a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K camera at an effective equivalent focal length of 5.6 meters.

This used a new, experimental version of my RocketTraker software, adaptively looking through the trajectory prediction published by FlightClub.io and seeking the closest point in the trajectory file based on the rocket's observed position and time. This allowed for greater tolerance of deviations from the expected timing of the booster landing and allowed me to follow it all the way down. This new version of RocketTraker will be published soon on my community page exclusively for channel members!

On Sunday 1/15/23 at 5:56 pm local time, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched a mission for the Space Force, USSF-67. I was able to track one of the boosters from launch at LC-39A to landing at LZ-1. This was filmed with an 11" Celestron NexStar GPS using a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K camera at an effective equivalent focal length of 5.6 meters.

This used a new, experimental version of my RocketTraker software, adaptively looking through the trajectory prediction published by FlightClub.io and seeking the closest point in the trajectory file based on the rocket's observed position and time. This allowed for greater tolerance of deviations from the expected timing of the booster landing and allowed me to follow it all the way down. This new version of RocketTraker will be published soon on my community page exclusively for channel members!

Thanks to Reds Rhetoric for the static camera footage, be sure to check out his channel and footage of this launch:
  

 / @redsrhetoric  

Music: Artemis by Scott Buckley | https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley
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