Just the fact’s ma’am. This week SpaceX rolled out the new updated look for their website and put out this fact-filled 2-minute drill on the Falcon 9: what it has achieved and the tests for future vertical landings. Enjoy the imagery and the music to get you pumped up.
13 Replies to “New SpaceX Video Highlights What You Need to Know About the Falcon 9 Rocket”
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The video showed the 1st stage and stated “Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning to be reusable”. That’s not how I remember it.
There was a period where it slowly occurred to SpaceX that they might be able to recover the otherwise expendable 1st stage. “It would be difficult but they were going to try” is what Mr Musk said.
It turns out that it can be done after all and now they’re onto a real winner.
Most people dream big but can’t achieve their dreams. It’s wonderful that spacex dreamed big and yet can do better.
I recall well before falcon 9 that musk was planning to make his rockets reusable. And spacex did attempt to recover the first falcon 9 boosters.
Wasn’t falcon 9 designed to be recoverable from day one? Isn’t falcon 9 1v1 a result of falcon9s failure to be recovered??? falcon 9 was a test rocket all along for a falcon 9 R.
Spacex is planning to build giant ferry boat to Mars it will most likely look like a giant falcon Heavy.
So Spacex has a heavy lift program now. These smaller rockets are test rockets for this larger MCT Mars Colonial Transporter.
HOW DO YOU BUILD AN AFFORDABLE HEAVY LIFTER??
You design it to be reusable!
Isn’t spacex:s grasshopper program the critical path to affordable heavy lift???
Hi DTARS,
Good to see you posting here.
When was “day one” exactly? The Falcon 1 flight at Kwajalein of March 2006? I’m not aware of announced plans for the Falcon 9-R dating back to this time – which is the impression the video clip might give – but I join you and everyone else in congratulating SpaceX on progress to date and wish them every success in the future, especially regarding Mars and the MCT.
Thanks.
My recollection is that Space X always planned to have reusable rockets, but started out by just getting *usable* rockets working first.
SpaceX worked on ‘reusability’ from the start… even the Falcon 1 boosters had heat shielding and chutes to try to return them to earth.
But the aerodynamic forces and heating destroyed the boosters before the chutes could be use… so SpaceX gave up on passive return, and developed powered return.
Has the internal process of SpaceX been documented?
Publicly, as I remember it, they announced reuse with the 1st launch which had chutes for that purpose. As I remember it, the “difficult” statement was added after they lost 1-2 1st stages.
I’m thinking… after boost phase the first stage separates from the rest of the stack. Shortly thereafter three drogue chutes pop out to orient and initially slow the booster. Then the main chute deploys. It is a para-glider with controllable flight surfaces for extended traverse during descent. Passing 20,000 feet the main chute is cut free and the booster’s rockets occasional bursts turn into a continuous roar…
SpaceX tried chute recovery, but the stages were tumbling through the atmosphere.
When you have added legs and saved fuel for a slam landing, chutes is only added weight.
Worse than tumbling, they were going at Mach 10. The heat damage was sufficient that by the time it had slowed enough to deploy a parachute, it was a lost cause.
While I agree they aren’t using chutes as a primary, in reference to Dragon, Musk noted there would be chutes on board as a backup. Granted, Dragon is not F9, but I wonder if SpaceX has the same redundancy in mind for the booster itself.
The booster velocity is thousands of MPH at separation…. chutes are shredded or destroyed by heat at that speed…. a heat shield for the entire booster is too heavy… chutes are heavy.
you have a functional rocket, and fuel is cheap… so you use the engines to first slow down the nearly empty booster to sub-sonic speeds, navigate to where you are going can land, then the final landing.
So even if you must use a 2x larger booster to carry the extra fuel for reuse, fuel is cheap, and you can save the perhaps $40 million vehicle cost… so re-usability is a big cost win.
Apparently there is some confusion in the term drogue chute? The drogue chute can be either a supersonic or a subsonic parachute, depending on design, initial deployment and descent conditions. Don’t forget, at extremely high altitudes the air is VERY thin. A drogue stabilizer may not look like a normal parachute? Might be much larger than you’d imagine or Instead be a simple balloon or cone shape? An upside-down ‘anchor’ if you will, attached to the top of the rocket, engines now pointing downward… ready to do the deeds.