SpaceX announces Heavy Lift rockets

[DocM]

At last weeks AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference SpaceX gave presentations showing their HLV (Heavy Lift Vehicle) timeline, including 2 rockets that would exceed the Saturn V moon rockets performance: the Falcon 10 Heavy and the Falcon 20. Certainly looks like they're serious about competing for the NASA heavy lifter contract.

They're gonna hear those babies fire all the way to Virginia :p

And it sure sounds like the Merlin 2 is a scaled up Merlin 1 rather than based in that Rocketdyne RS-84 engine tech they licensed 2-3 years ago. Then there are the references in other materials to the need for a NERVA style nuclear Mars stage, electric rockets for tugs and a methane version of the Merlin 1. Explains why they're doubling the size of their test area in Texas.

Here are the powerpoints....

PPTX-1.....

PPTX-2.....

Also interesting is 2 Falcon 9 families - one with cores made up of 9 Merlin 1's and one with cores consisting of singe Merlin 2's. Wonder it there'll be a price difference?

[Growled Member]

When commercial rockets take off (pun intended) we may not even need NASA anymore.

[DocM]

We need NASA to do the bleeding edge research, but not to provide taxi service around the solar system - and certainly no longer at cost-plus.

[BoredBozirini]

Holy **** that rocket is huuuuuuuuuuuge!

[Stokkolm]

NASA will become the Space Force, they wont be going anywhere.

[DocM]

Holy **** that rocket is huuuuuuuuuuuge!

To put a fine point on it; the Falcon XX could orbit the mass equivalent of a fully-fueled 767-200 airliner crewed with 60% of the people ever launched into space by all nations combined.

Yup, that's a big rocket :yes:

[Wanderermy]

Holy **** that rocket is huuuuuuuuuuuge!

That's what she said.

[wrack]

^ Just couldn't resist, couldn't you? :p

Hopefully this will initiate a new technological race among private sector.

[DocM]

SpaceX just announced a price for the Falcon 9 Heavy, meaning it's in the pipeline for a test launch

Price: $95 million

Which is just under the price for a Russian Proton but with about 1.5x the performance.

Launch Site: Cape Canaveral AFS

Inclination: 28.5 degrees

Mass to Low Earth Orbit (LEO): 32,000 kg (70,548 lb)

Mass to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO): 19,500 kg (42,990 lb)

The Space Shuttle can loft just 24,400 kg (53,600 lb) to LEO and 3,810 kg (8,390 lb) to GTO.

How insane is the Falcon 9 Heavy? It will have 27 engines in just the first stage and 28 overall. This artists concept of its business end was created using images of a real Falcon 9 engine cluster as a basis. Other images via SpaceX.

[Neo003]

^ Just couldn't resist, couldn't you?

Hopefully this will initiate a new technological race among private sector.

It's not going to create race of anything, there will be one company dominating and our goverment will pay billions of dollars to use there rockets. Those kind of technological race is so past century.

[DocM]

Events are already moving towards competitions for both rockets and spacecraft.

Bigelow wants at least 2 spacecraft to fly crews to his private space stations. The first Bigelow station starts construction in 2014, and they will have more interior space than the ISS. BIG, and the tech is proven - 2 subscale test modules have been up for 4 and 5 years respectively.

Congress wants a NASA Heavy Lift Vehicle, but gave precious few details about how to build it. They could easily use a core build by one company and engines by another. Atlas V Phase 3 with SpaceX Merlin 2 engines instead of the usual Russian made ones? Sure.

There is also a plan for a private HLV which SpaceX and probably ULA (Boeing/Lockeed joint venture) would want a piece of, or the whole thing. Redundancy is the keyword, primarily to prevent problems like when the shuttle had issues and the US was essentially grounded.

Then there is Sierra Nevada which got a big grant from NASA to develop their Dream Chaser spaceplane.

It's getting busy out there.

[DocM]

Another bit of news about Falcon 9 Heavy -

SpaceX has just accelerated its development so as to compete for military and reconnaissance launches, and they're building another launch complex at Vandenberg AFB in California.

They've also started building a new office near Washington DC - right across the street from from the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office headquarters.

[neoadorable]

superficially it looks like things are going the right way, or at least moving...but it's still freakin rockets Doc. all that materiel, pollution and debris to lift 20 tons to 35K above sea level? no, scrap that rejigged 1960's tech and build us a spaceplane that can lift 200 tons to the moon and then land in one piece. i don't care if it cost 800 billion to develop. ****ing do it (no cussing aimed at you Doc, it's the beer talking, and it's aimed at the state of humanity).

[DocM]

Makes zero sense to use a spaceplane that way since every pound of wing etc. is a pound of payload you can't carry, and wings etc. are dead weight in space - no air for airfoils. Best option is something like Reaction Engines SABRE engine in a fly-back booster. A SABER engine is always a rocket, but it breathes air in the atmosphere then turns into a tank-fed rocket at high altitude, saving the weight of carrying enough liquid oxygen for the whole trip and turning that into payload mass & re-usability.

A fly-back booster would use this to loft a payload to orbit then return, leaving little to no space junk. If it were intended for beyond orbit (moon, transfer to a space dock as a way-point to Mars etc) then an insertion engine, chemical, nuclear or solar electric, would do the rest. Reaction Engines idea for this is a craft called Skylon, but its use could be far wider spread than that.

A key part of their tech is a pre-cooler that would turn intake air into liquid oxygen on the fly, and it's to be tested in the coming months. Reaction Engines is causing a lot of excitement, enough to get UK government funding in these tough times.

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/

[HawkMan]

Well a spaceplane does make more sense, especially with engines like that, the wings will also be fuel tanks, and with a lifting body design you don't need very big wings. on top of that, it will require less fuel to get into space because of the wings at lower altitude. and it can require virtually no fuel for the landing. and on top of that, it's reusable. fully 100% reusable. Nasa's proposed unmanned designs even had a return to flight time measured in days. just a few days in the shop to make sure everything is still attached, refuel, fill up the payload and off you go again.

and they have far lower risk of blowing up, or needing to be blown up on launch due to failure of some kind. and if there is a failure, 99.9% of the time it'll be able to abort and land. not blowing up the precious billions dollar payload that they can't even afford to insure in the process.

[neoadorable]

well said Hawk! not trying to counter the logic you're presenting Doc, you obviously know more about this than i do, but i think the problem with these designs is that they're not bold enough. aerospace design has become used to being starved, so everything they do is in the little-by-little school of thought. i truly hope that will change. to me, there's no reason why something like the space shuttle can't be expanded on and modified, even very radically, so that it can go to the moon, or at least geosync orbit. having all of these multi-stage techhnologies is what doesn't make sense to me. of course wings and such are valuable, make a hybrid design that can fly atmospheric and vacuum and you got it justified. it's not dead weight anymore. wings can be used to store fuel, life support, whatever, like Hawk said.

[DocM]

Launch explosions are pretty rare these days. In the real world 99% of the time launch failures are due to the failure of a fuel/oxidizer turbopump or the avionics. The few that remain are actual engine failures.

What you see as a rocket blowing up on YouTube or TV is actually a "Flight Termination System" doing what it's designed to do: tearing apart the tanks & burning the fuel before it can crash and do worse damage on the ground.

In any case, manned spacecraft from here on will have launch escape systems, unlike the shuttle which (stupidly) has flown all these years without one.

Even Challenger would have been survivable if they had followed through on the original concept of providing the shuttles crew cabin/pressure hull with a freaking parachute: the crew survived until it hit the water at >200 mph. Instead of the parachutes NASA opted to increase cargo capacity. True.

SpaceX's Dragon will have an integrated, re-usable one that can also be used as part of a dual land/water capable landing system; 'chutes over water & rocket landings (w/parachute backup) over land.

[DocM]

And if anyone thinks a vertical rocket landing system is only for promotional graphics, this is a real world test of such a system on Blue Origin's Goddard capsule testbed -

[HawkMan]

What you see as a rocket blowing up on YouTube or TV is actually a "Flight Termination System" doing what it's designed to do: tearing apart the tanks & burning the fuel before it can crash and do worse damage on the ground.

YEs, and I said as much in my post, and it's fairly irrelevant, the end result is that rockets have right now a fairly high failure rate. and when they fail, no matter how, they also blow up the payload worth millions. and in most cases the payload is uninsured. The insurance is simply to ridiculously high, this stems again, from the high risk of launching satellites, and the high failure rate.

and verticaly landing vehicles is nice and all. and we know they work. Bug again, proper lifting body spacecraft is several hundred times more effective, since they don't need to use all that fuel to land. never mind taking off.

[DocM]

Taking off for Goddard was just to negate the need to rent a C-130 class drop plane. The real test was coming down.

For Goddard and Dragon that fuel will be on board at launch anyhow; if launch escape is needed then it's used for that with the landing by parachute offshore, and if not then it'll be used for landing at either Edwards AFB or KSC.

These two uses for the same fuel are mutually exclusive, and the margin for Dragon is huge as there is nearly 1,300 kg on board. Better to use it than throw it away after launch & have it burn up.

As far as reliability goes - the fuels are hypergolic, so ignition is assured, and Dragon will have 8 engines more powerful than needed, so losing 1-2 will have little effect. All they have to do is slow it from terminal velocity, a little over 250 mph, to zero.

[HawkMan]

what the hell are you even talking about.

no matter what the fuel has to be there, fuel is weight, weight means less payload weight.

Rockets are by design inefficient. they will never be efficient, they will always be a waste. a lifting body spaceplane will always be more effective, and have a much faster return to flight time.

and havign lots of engines isn't a good thing. 8 instead of 1 engines, 8 times more likely something will go wrong. and even if 7 or 6 doe have enough power to get up. you have power balance issues. it's a rocket not a plane, again.

No matter how you put it, a spaceplane will be more effective, sure the fuel is in there already, because it has to be there. on the spaceplane, that could lift the same weight, but itself be 1/3rd or 1/4th the weight fuel included. won't pollute like rockets do, it doesn't have to be there. it only need the fuel for getting liftoff and into space and possibly none to land. and because it's lifting body and flies like a place on the ground, it won't need anywhere near the amount of fuel of rockets, much less the engine power.

face it, rockets are least centuries tech.

[thechronic]

mmm...so now i have a way of getting my breakfast upstairs without my useless wife!

[neoadorable]

Doc, why do you think the idea of one machine taking off from earth and landing on the moon is so unfeasible? this is not asked as a challenge, i really do want to know since it's obvious you know what you're talking about. to this sci-fi loving layman with some science understanding it just doesn't seem beyond possible. maybe a plane to high orbit, not to the moon, and then another ship to the moon. but not some clunky 1940's rocket to orbit, cause that's what all of these are to me, effectively. they're glorified V2's. we need the Valkyrie from Avatar. that's what we need...

[DocM]

Single launch to the moon requires a super-heavy launcher like Saturn V, which always suffer the same problems: high unit costs, high continuing costs and low launch rates due to the limited mission. 95% of a Saturn V/Apollo mission was disposable out of necessity; all we got back was the Apollo which was still not reusable. Saturn V/Apollo was canceled because of the high recurring costs of that methodology.

Using a similar method in the now cancelled Constellation program & using two launchere, Ares I (crew) and Ares V (lander & departure stage) ran well over $1B per mission. Some peggedcit at >$1.5B/ mission. Ridiculous.

On the other hand, if you havd a re-usable exploration class ship always in space its cost is amortized oved numerous missions, and tha cost to launch, for example, a crewed Dragon would be <$150M. Add another cheap EELV launcher like Falcon 9 Heavy to re-fuel/re-stock the exploration ship and the mission cost still drops dramatically.

Yes, cost matters. Yes, there is still a csse for super-heavy launchers, but that case is assembling even larger exploration class ships for Mars and other planetary missions, not the Moon, and lofting those huge 100+ metric ton Bigelow modules to EML-1 or where-ever. Only those missions would provide a launch rate high enough to make super-heavy economically sound.

[neoadorable]

so it all boils down to economics, not science...we have our priorities screwed on wrong. you're telling me we can do it, but we can't justify it to the bean counters.