Inaugural Flight of SpaceX's New Rocket Comes Off Smoothly

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Wall St Journal

By ANDY PASZTOR

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. on Sunday successfully launched its largest, most powerful rocket yet, hoping it will become the centerpiece of an accelerated mission schedule for the Pentagon, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a host of commercial customers.

The beefed-up Falcon 9 that blasted off on its maiden flight from Southern California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a small Canadian government communication and research satellite, went through a seemingly picture-perfect countdown and performed on ascent as engineers hoped. The changes to the rocket are aimed at improving capacity and reliability, while simultaneously speeding up manufacturing.

Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure. Early this month, Elon Musk, the company's founder, chief executive and chief designer, seemingly tried to play down expectations by sending out a Twitter message emphasizing that the revamped rocket "has a lot of new technology, so the probability of failure is significant."

While it was a demonstration flight, Sunday's mission marked an important transition for SpaceX, as the closely held Hawthorne, Calif., company is known. It was the first time a SpaceX booster blasted off from Vandenberg, giving the fast-growing company access to another launch facility besides Florida's Cape Canaveral at a time SpaceX seeks to step up its pace of launches.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579105312781353496.html

[truthisfreedom]

1. Congrats to Elon Musk!

Another smashing success!

[Rain Mcloud]

2. Musk defies gravity?Nay,he laughs at it!

TSLA stock continues to dumbfound the X-perts and so they now say that they said it would all along but that it is time to Runfor the hills even as the retail stock people grow the pie higher and the pros bail out on their golden parachutes.
I have my popcorn and soda and a white knuckle grip on the keyboard wishing i had some skin to put in the game.
[link:https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:TSLA|

[bananas]

3. More info on the rocket

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/28/1242089/-Historic-SpaceX-Launch-Scheduled-for-Tomorrow-Morning-Sweet-Rocket-Pics

SAT SEP 28, 2013 AT 12:44 PM PDT

Historic SpaceX Launch Scheduled for Tomorrow Morning (+Sweet Rocket Pics)

byTroubadourFollow

The maiden flight of a new, highly advanced and powerful SpaceX rocket is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9 am PDT from the Vandenberg launch range in California. The new rocket, called the Falcon 9 v. 1.1 - a typically massive understatement of the level of progress it represents over the original Falcon 9 - has new and drastically more powerful (and more efficient) engines, the Merlin 1D, which are arranged in a different configuration than before, has a substantially longer tank and more fuel, and is designed to relight after stage separation in hope of eventually allowing stages to land back on the pad.

The 1.1 will, it's hoped, evolve through incremental tweaking into the Falcon 9-R, whose first stage will be fully reusable and capable of landing back at the launch site. Moreover, the 1.1/9-R would serve as the core of the three-core Falcon Heavy that would - if I understand correctly - serve as the workhorse of SpaceX's Mars ambitions and its "ULA killer" that would shatter the current Boeing/Lockheed monopoly on US military and intelligence launches. Here's the 1.1 at Vandenberg, BTW:

<snip>

The timetable for these planned evolutions is astonishing: Between 1 and 3 years to evolve from the 1.1 currently on the pad to the 9-R and FH. And SpaceX has proven itself capable of such amazing speeds, since the original Falcon 9/Dragon flew its inaugural flight only 3 years ago, and the much smaller Falcon 1 that initially demonstrated the Merlin engine had its first successful flight only two years before that. This should be made clear: The rocket you see above is the most advanced ever built by humans, by a wide margin, and is not even the end-product. It's not the most powerful (that honor goes to the Saturn V), but in terms of technology is far ahead of anything else that has ever been built.

<snip>

Moreover, they're ramping up production of 1.1s and Dragons at their factory in Hawthorne, CA, and beginning to churn them out like Khrushchev's proverbial "sausages." The plan, according to SpaceX, is to ultimately manufacture forty 1.1/9-R cores per year. Here are some awesome new images from the factory floor:

<snip>

[Hekate]

4. It rattled our windows for an unusually long time

We didn't know Vandy-land was planning on a launch (after all, they don't consult us), but figured they were doing something because when we have an earthquake the lamp over the kitchen table sways like a pendulum, in addition to the windows rattling. As it was we just continued to chat and periodically check the lamp while the rattling went on and on and on. Amazing, especially since I just checked the distance between there and here, and by the road it's 60 miles.

Glad to see the space program still exists.