Things have been kind of quiet on the blog because a) I’m still busy renovating the house in Florida and more importantly, b) my bandwidth is limited here, as there’s no Internet service to the house, and I have to rely on tethering to my phone.
I didn’t post about it at the time, but my Twitter followers know that I drove up to the Cape on Saturday afternoon, with a press pass to the SpaceX launch early Sunday morning. It was the first Falcon launch I’ve seen on the east coast (I did see one pass through the clouds at the January Vandenberg launch).
It was impressive. I don’t know what the quantity distance is for that vehicle, but we were on a causeway in the middle of the Indian River at CCAFS, and I think the pad was only a couple miles away, judging from the time that I saw the ignition and started to hear (and feel) the roar. It was sufficiently bright that it temporarily shut down the center of my retinas, but I could see it all the way downrange past staging. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rocket naked eye that far downrange. It was very impressive, but I hope it becomes routine, including the landing, if it hasn’t already. The next step is to start reflying those stages that they continue to collect (six now). I told John Taylor that SpaceX now has a bigger fleet of reusable rockets than NASA ever had.
Speaking of which, Stephanie Osborn has a guest post from a fellow former NASA colleague with thoughts on the failure of reusability of the Shuttle.
I think that whether single pour or the selected segmented design, solid rockets on a reusable crewed vehicle were a mistake. And the fact that Jim Fletcher was head of NASA (and “Barfing Jake” Garn) is also part of the explanation for building them in Utah, Florida’s environmental regulations notwithstanding.
But as I’ve noted in the past, it’s a huge fallacy of hasty generalization to attempt to draw lessons about reusability of spacecraft from that program.
SpaceX uses LC 40, which to the reviewing stands on the causeway is 4 miles away. In comparison, the clock in the press area is 3 miles away from Pad 39A, and the families sat over by the Saturn V also 4 miles away for shuttle launches.
I was able to follow STS-130 for 6 minutes.
I wasn’t in the reviewing stands. I was parked along the causeway, about as close as one could get and still not be in the water.
The difference along the causeway is between 3.9 (KSC side) and 4.5 miles (CCAFS). For others, the real issue is that if you can’t get inside KSC or CCAFS, the closest location is the visitor center at about 6.5 miles. If you can’t get on Merritt Island, the closest location is the Port of Cocoa Beach at 10 miles, and then 12 miles to Titusville. The sound part is always interesting, because its not just the intensity, but at the distance, the vehicle will be visually off the pad and flying before you hear engine ignition. With the STS, you could see the shock wave on the water approach you.
All I know is that there was about twelve seconds, maybe slightly more, between ignition and when I heard the sound. You do the math. I couldn’t see shock on the water, because it was dark.
it’s a huge fallacy of hasty generalization to attempt to draw lessons about reusability of spacecraft from that program
Yeah Shuttle is merely one data point. I remember more than one study claiming it would be better off to reuse a first stage that goes close to Mach 8 than the second stage. One example would be HTHL Hopper design from DLR. Although I think the vehicle was a bad idea for several reasons (large dry mass because of the HTHL configuration, using crap Vulcain engines), like I said, the idea of reusing the first stage and expending the second stage seemed good to me. The X-34 also had a similar concept. It was more interesting in some regards than Hopper but it also had little funding and no engine.
I am glad someone decided to get TSTO VTVL for orbital launch to work. People even used to joke about it at one point. It was like the thing everyone know should work but wasn’t proven to because no one actually bothered to even try. Someone even wrote a novel about it a couple of years back: “The Rocket Company”…
https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1563476967