
Musk: SpaceX to Attempt Falcon 9 First Stage Water Landing - someperson
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2013/03/28/musk-spacex-to-attempt-falcon-9-first-stage-water-landing/?
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danieldrehmer
Q. Can you provide more details on Dragon Version 2?

Musk: Significant upgrades, powerful side mounted thruster pods. Quite big
windows for astronauts to see outside. Landing legs that pop out of the
bottom. It look like kind of a real alien spaceship. Started with landing on
water because it was the easiest thing to do and we didn’t really know what we
were doing. Didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. Now want to push the
envelope on the technology.

Plan to unveil Dragon Version 2 later this year.

\- - - - - - - - -

Fuck. Yes.

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ricw
Exciting times. By mid-next-year spacex might make space travel an order of
magnitude cheaper ($60mio vs $200k, aka launch vehicle cost vs fuel cost). It
will lead to a paradigm shift as to what can feasibly be sent to space. Who
knows it might even lead to a satelite startup craze. All in hopefully only 1
1/2 years.. Go spacex!

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Retric
There are limits to how much stuff you can put into space and many of the more
useful orbits are getting fairly saturated. However, cost is what prevents
people from using most orbits so there is a lot of room up there.

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jessriedel
First, the spatial safety margins given to satellites don't really depend on
the volume of the craft, so enabling much cheaper per-kg-to-LEO can greatly
increase the amount of stuff up there in the same number of crafts. Second,
I'm sure there are all sorts of clever ways to dramatically increase what we
can fit up there if it were useful. Cheaper lift costs make it both cheaper
and more valuable to clear space junk, etc. The amount of raw space up there
is massive, something like millions of cubic miles _per satellite_.

(Surface area of Earth is 200 million square miles, times an easily accessible
LEO altitude range between 120 and 170 miles, gives 1 million cubic miles for
each of the 8000 satellites, operational or otherwise, currently in orbit.)

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Retric
It's not just the satilite's you need to worry about try and put 10x the crap
into orbit and suddenly the 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km
altitude becomes 3 million. (It's paint flakes etc.) Which dramatically
increases the amount of shielding required to survive the sand blasting and
further increasing tiny junk up there and eventually the required shielding
may become untenable.

Now, at some point clearing space junk is going to be worthwhile, but I think
we are still a long way from that point.

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jessriedel
Thanks. My understanding is that the amount of space junk produced per
satellite launched is purposefully much lower now than in the past.

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JulianMorrison
Cool, so they are not just trying for a first stage powered landing, that's
the big ticket item but they also slipped a powered Dragon landing in there
too - two of three stages closing in fast on reusable recovery. Wow.

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pjungwir

        > Q. What was the problem with the thrusters on Dragon?
        > Musk: There was a "very tiny change"
    

Sounds like software development!

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ChuckMcM
That is an interesting approach, basically assuming that the first stage is
"lost" and try to land it. If you do land it win! if not, well you didn't need
to anyway.

Does anyone know if the landing will be parachute assisted like the solid
rocket boosters of the shuttle?

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jccooper
SpaceX tried parachute recovery of first stages with earlier launches.
Apparently it trashed the stage pretty good every time, so that they consider
it a failed technique. (They've never released photos of a recovered part, so
far as I know, which I think is evidence of embarrassment.)

With their Grasshopper work, I expect they'll try to save the mass and effort
involved with parachutes and just do propulsive recovery. (Parachutes are
surprisingly hard, and adding a second system of any sort is probably more
than twice the work--and raises the probability of failure.)

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zaroth
Bug fixing rockets in space!

Q. What was the problem with the thrusters on Dragon?

Musk: There was a “very tiny change” to three of the check valves on the
oxidizer tank. Different from the previous ones that flew, and they got stuck.
Was able to write some new software in real time that was uploaded with Dragon
to increase pressure upstream from check valve and release it. The spacecraft
version of the Heimlich maneuver. Once they got unstuck, they worked very
well.

Had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was drifting.
Worked with the Air Force to get higher powered dishes to communicate with
Dragon and upload the software.

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mckoss
I wonder if they are contracting with Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos's space
company). They've been focusing on powered return from the beginning of their
program.

[http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-o...](http://www.blueorigin.com/updates/updates-2011-11-17-video-
of-the-short-hop-flight.html)

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kiba
Cool about the fact that there's increase in cargo capacity by 60%, but
doesn't the grasshopper project will eventually reduce capacity to something
like 1/10? (Can't find the quote right now but I swore I seen something like
this)

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noselasd
Are there any videos of this press conference ?

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pjungwir
Does anyone know what "sequestration" means?

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ceejayoz
If you're living in the States, I'm guessing you've been living under a rock
the last few months.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_sequestration>

Short summary: Dysfunctional Congress set up automatic harsh spending cuts to
force compromise. Shockingly, they couldn't compromise, so they went into
effect.

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andyl
So cool - Agile Aerospace.

Does anyone know (or guess) where the first stage will splash down?

And when the first stage returns to dry land - where will it come down?
Azores?

