Business, Space, Technology and Society

Falcon Heavy

19 Comments

This should be easy, they said. Just glue three Falcon 9s together, they said:

Musk said the rocket cores for Falcon Heavy’s first flight are two to three months away from completion. He emphasized that the first launch will carry a lot of risk, and as such, SpaceX doesn’t plan to carry a valuable payload or payloads with it.

“We will probably fly something really silly on Falcon Heavy because it is quite a high risk mission,” he said.

I’m glad to see that they’re finally coming close. It’s an important development, both technically and politically. Also, the claimed LEO payload is now up to 64 tonnes, so it’s almost the capability of SLS Block 1B.

[Update early afternoon]

If we want bigger telescopes or to go to Mars, we need heavy lift, “experts” say.

Nonsense.

19 thoughts on “Falcon Heavy”

  1. For me, this is the big transition. If they succeed, then commercial space flight will have a niche that no one else has, particularly, if the SLS fails.

  2. I assume by “not” you mean “now,” right, Rand?

    64 mT? If true, that really does render SLS looking more redundant than ever. (Technically, I believe, the 70mT applies to Block I, not Block Ib, which is supposed to be able to deliver 105mT, last I checked. But what of it? If you really need that much payload delivered, you just use two Falcon Heavies (or New Glenns) – for what will still be a small fraction of the cost of a single SLS launch. Any SLS mission is going to require multi launch profiles anyway.)

    1. And if assembling things in space is too hard there’s little point in going out there anyway.

      1. Um, I think there is an existence proof of the fact that assembly in space is possible…it’s known as the ISS. Despite having made it as difficult as they could possibly have made it, NASA et al managed to do it.

    2. Even the ITS, or whatever Musk is calling it, stages in LEO to transfer either crew or fuel.

  3. Cross-feeding propellant from the side boosters must have been quite the challenge. More than they thought. I very much look forward to seeing if they can pull it off.

    2. My understanding was that cross-feed was off the list for the near term. Is that incorrect, or is it back on?

    3. The last I heard, they had scrapped crossfeeding, at least for now. That makes sense to me. Just concentrate on getting it flying, and upgrade to crossfeed later.

  4. I knew FH would be more than 53 tons simply because they announced that before the engine upgrades. The old number was 13 tons to mars orbit (enabling the red Dragon.) I wonder what the mass to mars orbit is now going to be?

  5. Instead of ‘Reusable’, SpaceX should call them ‘Flight Proven’. Sounds better!

    64 metric tons without crossfeed and a high-energy upper stage. Impressive!

  6. Fill it up with water, O2 and food and park the payload 100 nm ahead or behind the International Space Station

  7. I was really annoyed by the scare quotes around “flight proven.” They are, goddammit! The ranges recently went through a big exercise to figure out what probability of failure should be used in risk calculations for the SES-10 launch (the first booster reuse). Some people thought it should be higher than for a new stage, some thought it should be lower. So they just used the Pf that one would use for the next expendable. The fact is, no one knows. But another fact is that the SES-10 first stage demonstrated that it worked in its first flight. That constitutes flight proven, no matter what happens the next time.

  8. Why isn’t orbital assembly a thing? ISS wasn’t sent up in one piece. Von Braun’s architecture choice for flag and footprints missions in the 60’s doesn’t set precedent. Orbital assembly should be the norm.

    1. The stepping stone is Robotguy’s Legos in space. Actual construction can happen later when we have much larger crews. A mass produced 4 port docking collar (ports 120 degrees apart) makes an infinite number of designs possible from rings to chains. Think of it like a carbon atom?

    2. The problems I have heard of most often for assembly in orbit are:

      1.) Connecting node modules that mass more than anyone thought they would

      2.) The danger of EVA work

      3.) The lack of dedicated tugs, both for towing modules in closer to the Station and for delicate near Station maneuvering.

      All of the three are small enough projects to not attract a funding Committee Chair’s favor. At the same time, they’re large enough, even without the “suggestions” about subcontractors by the political patron, that a larger project’s budget can be distorted by including them in it. The rigid aluminum cans must not leak at the seams, so their connection modules must be incredibly stiff. That adds mass, and makes for cascading problems like power cables running through the connecting passages.

      With the danger of EVA work, they don’t want to put the cables and other intersection connectors on the outside, because they would have incidents where they’d have to trace power connections and air leaks through them, on the outside for hours and hours at a time. The expense of a tug, what is essentially a small orbiting spacecraft with many hours endurance, with manipulators and other tools strapped on, is something no one has yet been willing to face up to since the first ones were cancelled in the 1970s. This is true for either a tug for close-in work, like working on those exterior power cables and ECLS systems, or one for “fetch it” tasks in orbit.

      These problems can be ameliorated by on-orbit manufacture of stations. 3-D printing and other tech advances, whether SpideFab or Archinaut will all be involved in that. Larger sections can be manufactured there, with fewer needed joins for separate pieces. Some of the joining problem even with small modules launched by rockets from Earth might be solved without a joining node module by a sufficiently capable seal between two modules produced on-orbit by a 3-d printer of metallic parts, for rigidity. Still, eventually these problems must be solved on their own. Again, these are things that have not found an elected patron involved in funding NASA. I expect private groups will eventually do so, and I hope that they can get funded from sources outside Congress soon. Whether this can be done by Bigelow or their new competitors, it needs doing.

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