co-authored with Douglas Dechow
Last Friday night, we stayed up late to watch the launch of the Dragon capsule. Anna watched NASA-TV, and Doug watched the SpaceX broadcast. Because the launch of this commercial venture to replace the space shuttle for U.S. transport to the International Space Station had been delayed before, we didn't rush to Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch in person. We'd done that four times to see the space shuttle. Admittedly, having seen the last two shuttle launches in person, we didn't know how we'd feel about watching this test of launch and rendezvous by Space Exploration Technologies, otherwise known as SpaceX. So we choose to keep our distance.
As the hours elapsed on Friday afternoon and evening with no problems, we started to regret our decision not to fly cross-country, stay up all night, and wait for hours among the mosquitos. A few weeks earlier, Garrett Reisman, a former shuttle astronaut and now senior engineer at SpaceX, had assured us that, although there is always the possibility of a small problem delaying a rocket launch for a couple of days, the Dragon capsule atop the Falcon 9 rocket would be absolutely ready to go on May 19. As the countdown clock continued its steady slide, we became convinced that Reisman was right.
But then the clock ticked to zero, and the rocket didn't budge. We held out breaths. We leaned toward our computer screens. No liftoff. With a launch window of just a single second, any last-minute delay meant an abort. In this case, a problem in an engine pressure valve shut down the process automatically, just a split-second before the rocket was set to go.
Lofty Ambitions guest blogger Margaret Lazarus Dean did rush to the Space Coast for the weekend launch attempt. In her "Postcard From the Earth" at the Huffington Post yesterday, she wrote,
Even though today's launch was not successful, and even though the retirement of the space shuttle has been hard on space fans -- especially people here on the Space Coast -- my experience at today's launch attempt confirms the simple and irrefutable love people have for spaceflight, the unending appeal of the idea that human being can leave the surface of the planet where we evolved.
But you might think, it's just a test. And this one is an unmanned one at that. It's just the prelude for manned re-supply missions to the space station. It's not as if NASA hasn't figured all this out before. It's not as if SpaceX isn't building on the decades of technological progress NASA already made. Low-Earth orbit is nothing new. Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out in a tweet, "If Earth were size of a schoolroom globe, our atmosphere wouldn't be much thicker than the coat of lacquer on its surface." The International Space Station is about 230 miles away. Los Angeles is farther from Las Vegas than the space station is from the ground.
So Friday's last-second launch abort reminds us that spaceflight is hard. Really hard. And that's one reason that we bother going to space at all. President Kennedy told us that's why we plan missions to space: "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone." President Kennedy and Margaret Lazarus Dean are right. Irrefutable, no going back, and the present game is at the International Space Station. And we must go farther in the future.
Last night, we again stayed up to watch the launch of the Dragon capsule on NASA-TV. With the three-hour time difference for Californians, we could still get to bed by 1 a.m. The countdown again went smoothly: Stage 1 and Stage 2 auto-sequences started. Launch directors go for launch. The flight computer is in control of the vehicle. 3-2-1. Liftoff, and quickly, The vehicle is supersonic. Nine minutes into flight, it dispersed the ashes of 308 dead people, including Star Trek's James Doohan. Early this morning, a capsule designed and launched by a private company began orbiting the Earth, making its roughly 75-hour way to the International Space Station for a docking on Friday morning.
SpaceX is neither future nor failure. Based on this recent launch, SpaceX is the necessary present. As all artists (including writers like us) and scientists know, we must risk failure to make the new future. We're off to a new day and a good one.
David H. Bailey and Jonathan M. Borwein: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Art vs. 2012 Reality
Margaret Lazarus Dean: Postcard From the Earth
Ayodele Faiyetole: Ushering in the Final Frontier -- Manned Spaceflight
Falcon Heavy is a Falcon 9 with three parallel booster stages. It will be the first launch vehicle to use propellant cross-feed, whereby the center stage engines are fed from the outer stage tanks, depleting the outer tanks faster and leaving more propellant in the center stage when it separates from the outer stages.
Falcon Heavy will deliver 53 tons to low earth orbit, or more than double the performance of the most powerful rockets in the world today. It will be the second most powerful launch vehicle in history, following the Saturn V moon rocket.
So with a $4B manifest for Falcon 9 and the blue whale of the global comsat industry on board with the new Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is silencing the critics and earning the respect of the industry.
Again, looks like future, not like failure.
I'd recommend reading more than press releases.
And I am glad to see this payload finally going up.
This will give SpaceX the necessary confidence to pursue the man-rating of their hardware, next!
I am currently watching the NASA feed for the birthing of the Dragon. Oh my how things have changed over the past 50 years.
From here in Southern California I have followed the space program since my days as an 11 year old kid laying on my back on the flat roof of our patio house visually tracking Sputnik crossing the night sky and listening to it's radio beacon transmission on my old Hallicrafter SW radio. My mother worked for Radioplane/Rocketdyne weaving electrical harnesses and doing solder work.
The Rocketdyne engine test facility in the Santa Susana mountains to the west was only 15 miles away. The engines tested there rattled our windows and those engines went to space.
What a great experience it has been to witness first hand all the projects that we as a nation have accomplished to get us where we are today. The X-15 rocket plane, to the ISS.
We witnessed the roll-out of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. We later also watched the Shuttle land at Edwards.
And not to be overlooked, NASA/JPL is right up the hill. Been there many times.
Fast forwarding to now. The Dragon capsule has traveled from the SpaceX facilities at El Segundo and Hawthorn to within spitting distance of the ISS. I must say, Southern California has been a very interesting place for a person that first watched Sputnik cross the heavens.
I'm a happy old camper.
JPL's Open House is coming up on June 9-10. We've been once (saw a Mars rover being built!), and we recommend it to anyone in the area. Here's more info from JPL: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/open-house.cfm.
With that, all COTS 2 mission objectives are complete. Pending confirmation from NASA, SpaceX is clear to proceed into COTS 3 with the re-rendezvous, approach, and berthing ops on Friday.
So looking like future at the moment. Certainly not failure.
http://thwrex.blogspot.com/2012/05/legacy-of-nasa-shuttle-and-spacex.html
Here are the first few hundred words though:
The legacy of NASA Shuttle and the Spacex Challenge
In response to the Huffington Post blog referenced here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anna-leahy
What made the Shuttle (and the entire STS program) "the most complicated machine ever built by humankind" was the *imposed* need for Small Business Administration fulfillment. A very large percent of each spacecraft had to be built by both small and economically restricted businesses. Over 2.4 million components (most) produced by separate businesses on paper diagrams before the internet even existed. I have seen portions of those documents at (retired) Rockwell facilities. 10's of thousands of pages.
This was typical of the entire government contracting system of the 70's and 80's and not the fault of NASA. Essentially *any* aerospace company worked under the same rules. Inherent in this process is also a "freeze" of technology at the same time. Computers with the power of an Apple IIe were the initial processors used on board. Due to the cost and complexity of "redesign" this remained the case far longer than similar computers were used anywhere else.
What that procurement legacy gave us was a spacecraft system that ...
We're glad you're extending the conversation. It's good to see some specifics, too. We'll check out what you have to say. And of course, we have a lot more about the space shuttle at Lofty Ambitions blog.
There are about 50 satellites launched every year. SpaceX offers to cut the price for that service by about a factor of four. That's a hefty opportunity for healthy profit, while giving everyone more of the weather, communications, science and security that they've come to expect from space-based facilities over the last half century.
You have me thinking of how crowded it's become up there just beyond the Earth's atmosphere in the last few decades.
Then NASA delivered a $1.5 billion/flight boondoggle, which killed 2crew, and had multi-year service outages... NASA's shuttle was the most expensive, dangerous, unreliable space vehicle in history...
Then, NASA blew $20 billion on it's failed/canceled Constrllation project to create a new booster/capsule...
So, space is extremely hard for big govt, pork driven NASA...
Meanwhile, Private enterprise produced an entirely new, far advanced/economical booster/capsule far beyond anything NASA is capable of... For only $300 million...
So, space is not so hard for the efficient, innovative, spirited...
The total 12flight SpaceX COTS supply contract is for less than the cost of a single NASA shuttle flight...
(50 satellites worldwide, of which the majority are carried by Chinese and Russian launch vehicles which cost less than the Falcon 9 does now)
That is exactly what the SpaceX engineers DID NOT DO. They avoided unnecessary risk by programming the vehicle to go into a safe mode if there was the slightest detectable malfunction. And THAT was the right thing to do. This has nothing to do with spaceflight being hard. It's actually no harder than open heart surgery or detecting the Higgs particle (I would even claim that it is actually easier)... it just requires a different set of detailed technical skills than ANY non-trivial human effort.
Let me put this in a clear context for you: it took SpaceX ten years to get here. That's why SpaceX engineers and technicians don't mind delaying a crucial launch by six months, then by another three months and then by three more days. These delays simply don't matter. What matters is that they made it to orbit without a hitch.
Not only that... ten years is a SHORT period of time. Many space missions take 25 years from initial conception to success. Some projects took 40... which is basically the whole professional career of many of the people involved in them!
Soon mankind will, as a whole, embark on science projects that will take centuries to finish. And I have a strong feeling (based on physics) that we will, even before this millennium is over, start one or two that will take longer than all of recorded human history!
Few venture capitalists, and almost no public companies would be able to take such a long view.
It's a bad marriage, and NASA's Commercial Orbital Transport Services (COTS) program has been a remarkably successful experiment in seeing other people. It redefines the relationship between NASA and industry and lowers barriers for new ventures like SpaceX to compete with industry giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And it dramatically reduces the role of Congress in allocating contracts based on patronage.
SpaceX designs and builds their vehicles from start to finish under one roof. It's cheaper, faster, and more efficient that way. The check valve issue was resolved so quickly because the SpaceX engineers in launch control at the Cape were the same engineers who designed and developed the engine. There were no subcontractors involved.
Before COTS, NASA couldn't get funding for a streamlined operation like this. They had to get 60 Senators on board, and that means there had to be something in it for 20-30 different states. Lockheed Martin boasts that the Orion crew vehicle (financed under traditional NASA procurement) involves suppliers in 37 states. That's how you get these projects funded, and it's a big part of why costs spiral out of control.