Emphasis on SpaceX.
Yesterday's launch of the Mini-V2 satellites from Cape Canaveral SFS ended up
being interesting in a way I hadn't known beforehand. As a species we
seem to like to notice/pay attention to Big Round Numbers.
When booster B1076 landed on A Shortfall of Gravitas, it was their 100th
consecutive landing of a booster. That turns out to be not just a Big Round Number, as this Twitter
user noted, they have recovered in consecutive flights as many boosters as the
justifiably famous Delta II rockets ever flew.
Launch-wise, Falcon 9 and the Falcon family have already become the most statistically reliable rockets in history. Very few rockets in history have managed 100 consecutively successful launches, let alone landings. For example, according to spaceflight reporter Alejandro Romera, the next most reliable American rocket – the McDonnell Douglas Delta II – narrowly achieved 100 consecutively successful launches before its retirement in 2018. The landing reliability of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets is thus tied with the launch reliability of the most reliable American rocket not built by SpaceX.
That's just landings. The flagship of United Launch Alliance is arguably the Atlas V - now retired and serving out its last 19 missions. To date, the Atlas V has had 97 successful launches, meaning successful SpaceX landings are more common than Atlas V flights.
If you watched the SpaceX feed during the launch or the YouTube video, you may have noticed that among the very last things the announcer said was that this was their 174th landing of an orbital class booster. Since it was the 100th consecutive, clearly they lost some between their first landing and the string of 100. The string of 100 began almost two years ago to the day on March 4th 2021; the landing before that one (three weeks before in early February) was lost due to a previously unknown failure mode. There was a hole in a flexible ‘skirt’ meant to keep the superheated gases out of the flight-proven booster’s engine section.
The amount of information that SpaceX engineers have gathered about how to recover boosters, and the amount they've improved over the years is a solid case that they are so far ahead of the competition that it will take five or more years for another company to catch up.
And just because it's pretty:
Sunset launch last night. SpaceX photo.
Not related to any of the above. As of Tuesday night at nearly 9PM, the next launch of the three talked about Sunday, the Starlink Group 2-7 from Vandenberg SFB looks to be Wednesday, March 1 at 11:06 AM PST, or 2:06 PM here on EST.
The first launch in Monday's post will be the last launch of the three. The Crew 6 mission will be Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 12:34 AM EST. That makes the date and time run together as 3/2 1234. Coincidence?
SpaceX is bringing commercial industrial processes to space.
ReplyDeleteMaking rocket engines as quickly as the rocket engines of the AMRAAM, or quicker.
Making boosters and other components on an assembly-line basis not seen since the old days of the ICBM race (insert mental image of the Convair assembly line back in the day.)
Making everything else on a sped-up rate nobody is even able to think about attaining. Example, last night watched a documentary on the building of the Perserverance lander. One of the things they talked about was, when drilling holes to bolt things together, the time between drilling was in the hours range. A good shift could see 4 holes drilled, though usually only 2, and it was the driller and 4 engineers standing behind the driller. 5 people (at least) per hole per every 2-4 hours. Instead, how long did it take SpaceX to design, manufacture all the fiddly bits including a new argon thruster system and then assemble all the V2 Mini Starlink satellites? What, less than a year to design and build 30 of the things from start to finish?
Again, speeds not seen outside of commercial aviation, more like commercial automotive in some respects.
Crazy design, testing and manufacturing time crunching.
Crazy.
Looking for more crazy from the crazy people at SpaceX.
And still waiting on whether Vulcan is scrubbed due to issues with the BE4s.
Elon has envisioned spaceflight being as close to commercial aviation as possible. With Starship fully operational it will be.
DeleteElon makes it look easy, even though it's still hard as hell. But he doesn't have a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee.
ReplyDeleteSpaceX is a very merotropic organization. If you can't cut the mustard you are out.
DeleteMeritocracy rules! Don't give a rodent's rear about DIE (the initials are out of sequence, it describes perfectly what happens when you follow it... just sayin'). If you can hack it, your skin color and/or education is irrelevant. As it should be.
Delete