
SpaceX Launch - Official Webcast - nkoren
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/#
======
cryptoz
There's a lot riding on this launch. Pretty much every component is brand new.
This is the first flight of this rocket, which has new engines, a new engine
configuration, the payload fairing, and a much bigger body than their previous
F9. Most exciting of course is the attempt to test the re-entry part of the
re-usability program to connect with all the grasshopper tests.

If this works, they're going to be much closer to building completely and
rapidly re-usable spacecraft. I think their end goal is to have about a 1-hour
turnaround time. Spaceships will become like airplanes, and we'll have the new
frontier on our hands. This type of re-usability is what makes SpaceX's Mars
plans so possible in the short term and why everyone else seems to think
humans on Mars won't be until the 2030s or 2040s. With this type of
technology, shipping supplies and people to Mars will be so much cheaper than
anyone has ever really envisioned. I can't wait to move there!

I'm quite certain that Elon plans to have a massive ramp-up in trips to Mars
over the next 5 years. The software team that did their AMA on reddit a while
ago was very clear that we should expect to buy tickets to Mars inside a
decade - this certainly means that SpaceX will start ferrying supplies, fuel
reactors and everything else necessary to Mars (via Red Dragons?) in about 5
years.

Here's hoping.

~~~
avar

        > With this type of technology, shipping supplies and people to
        > Mars will be so much cheaper than anyone has ever really
        > envisioned. I can't wait to move there!
    

I used to be very personally excited about this too, but realistically I can't
see habitation on Mars becoming anything more than the equivalent of a
glorified trailer park in Antarctica within my lifetime, except with little
chance of return, and I'm not even 30 yet.

Exciting for humanity, yes! A nice place to go live? Probably not for another
100 years or so. I'm interested in why you'd be so keen to move there.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Mars colonization will take off extremely rapidly, most likely.

Making propellant on Mars is easy, all you need is Hydrogen and power and you
can make 16x as much mass in propellant as the Hydrogen you bring along. And
this is with mere kilograms of equipment to process the martian atmosphere.
Make no mistake, this is a big deal in a lot of different ways.

So that bootstraps you into being able to effectively explore Mars at all,
because now you don't have to ship out all the propellant for the return trip,
which is an exponential savings.

Now add to that the fact that Mars has a day similar to Earth and substantial
quantities of subsurface ice (and small amounts of water in the surface soil).
That means you can use fairly modest capital equipment (stuff you can
transport using the same vehicles you send people, and capable of being
powered fairly easily) to start mining water ice within the first handful of
trips to the planet. Which means that you can have local supplies of: potable
water, propellant, fuel for equipment that runs on internal combustion
engines, breathable oxygen, and carbon monoxide (which I'll explain the
significance of later).

With oxygen, abundant CO2, water, and inflatable structures you can start
growing plants on Mars due to the light levels and day lengths. A colony could
start supplying some of its own food within less than a decade.

But wait, there's more. Given the low Martian gravity it would be almost
trivially easy to create an SSTO RLV that could travel back and forth between
the martian surface and orbit, refueling on the surface with locally produced
propellant. You could build these on Earth and send them over without crews
and just enough propellant to make a powered, parachute assisted landing
before being put into service. They could visit a station in Mars orbit which
would make it easier to make trips back and forth to Earth.

Additionally, by using a cycler (a spacecraft which is on a permanent
trajectory looping between Earth and Mars) you could significantly increase
the amount of useful payload you could deliver to Mars and increase the
comfort and safety of passengers. Although for bulk cargo you could use
electric propulsion to push the cargo out of low Earth orbit over to Mars and
then use aerocapture / aerobraking to bring the payloads within reach of an
orbital tug at Mars that could bring it to a station where it could be ferried
down to the surface.

Back to Martian resources. With carbon monoxide available all you need is
energy in order to be able to effectively smelt metals such as iron, copper,
or aluminum. Some of the rocks and regolith on Mars are effectively high grade
ores, especially of iron. It would not take much equipment to be able to start
producing builk amounts of steel. This could be used for all sorts of purposes
in expanding a base into a full fledged settlement.

From there things accelerate quickly. It gets easier and easier to send things
to Mars, to come back from Mars, and to build things on Mars. Capital
investments on Mars start to make a huge amount of sense. A substantial power
source on Mars (even just in the single megawatt range) is not merely a
lifeline for a base it becomes the seed of a growing industrial base. With
power and water you can process the atmosphere and bootstrap the chemical
industry with all the products listed above. And with that you can smelt bulk
metals, and make glass. You can also start making concrete and other building
materials. You can start making buildings and farming structures where only a
small fraction of the structure is composed of supplies shipped from Earth.

And that's really just square 1. From there you can move on to more advanced
industry, more robust farming, more advanced technology, and so on. The very
first visitors to Mars will likely be scientists, but the second wave will be
dominated by engineers. Imagine what will be built with the thousands of
tonnes of steel, concrete, aluminum, copper, and so forth that will be
produced within only the first decade of this primitive industrial capacity
coming online. Certainly more than a trailer park in the skies, far more.

~~~
codex
All of this can be done today in the Sahara, or underwater, or on the top of
K2, but nobody has done them there. Why should Mars be any different?

Yes, one can do these things, but will the economics work out such that it's
actually feasible? For example, solar power on Mars is pitiful, and there are
no fossil fuels. Where does the power for industrial production come from?
Nuclear reactors? How expensive is it to bootstrap a reactor on another
planet? Where does the coolant come from without a nearby river?

~~~
InclinedPlane
The Sahara lacks a CO2 atmosphere, it also lacks substantial quantities of
subsurface ice.

Besides which, about 4 million people live in the Sahara today, despite many
of the surrounding countries being some of the poorest and least developed on
Earth.

The point of living on Mars is not to find the most convenient place possible
to live. That would not be Mars, nor would it be the Sahara, nor would it even
be Copenhagen, Dubai, or the Netherlands (where 10 million people live on land
that used to be under the sea). But people live in those places even so
because it turns out there are compelling reasons to live there. Just as, I
believe, there are compelling reasons to live on Mars (much more so than in
living in the Sahara).

Edit: most people living in the developed world today are swaddled in the
embrace of a vast web of advanced technology and industry. The hammer used to
build the home down the street was mined and forged an ocean away. The phone
you use every day contains components developed and manufactured across a
handful of continents. The food you eat could come from next door or across
the world. But that web of technology and industry is familiar to us, whereas
one involving living on Mars is alien and implausible to our sensibilities.
But over the course of decades and centuries as technology advances, as
industry develops, as the unusual becomes more commonplace, maybe people will
start to view life on Mars in a similar fashion. Maybe it won't seem so
impractical when the bounty of martian agriculture feeds substantial
populations, when martian industry is a multi-billion dollar or multi-trillion
dollar business, when cities full of people exist on Mars, and so on.

~~~
pm90
Wow, my creative mind is tingling with ideas of what this could lead to.
Martian politics? Martian colonies rebelling and forming their own 'nation'?
Race and gender issues on Mars? Possibility of wars between Earth and Mars
over the most easily accessible resources? Arms race? Etcetc... whoa!

~~~
cdash
There is a series of books written about that called the Mars Trilogy.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy)

------
rst
Per SpaceX post-launch press conference: all payloads delivered safely into
orbit.

First stage did not land intact. The first burn went OK. The second (single-
engine burn braking to the surface) cut off early: the stage spun, and the
roll was centrifuging fuel in the tanks. Pieces of the stage have been
recovered. (FWIW, this was with the tanks nearly drained. This may be
different from Grasshopper, which has ballast to get its weight up and make it
easier to control, possibly in the form of extra fuel.)

Next recovery attempt will be on the fourth Falcon 9 v1.1 launch (for space
station resupply, after two communication satellite launches).

There was also a problem relighting the second stage after payloads were
deployed; they've identified the issue, and will correct. (This would have
been an issue for the comsat launches, as delivering them into their desired
orbits requires relighting the engine.)

~~~
trafficlight
> First stage did not land intact.

Intact as in it broke up during descent?

~~~
rst
Not during descent --- it got to the point of doing the second burn, but that
sputtered out early because the stage was spinning too fast, and the spin was
centrifuging fuel to the edges of the tanks. They haven't actually said that
it hit the water too hard to stay in one piece, but that's the (fairly clear)
implication.

The spin was due to "aerodynamic torque" (i.e., it was spun up by the
atmosphere going down), per Elon's twitter stream.

~~~
w1ntermute
The tweet in question:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384407846349062144](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384407846349062144)

------
velodrome
The launch will included a number of Falcon 9 v1.1 "firsts", including:

 _\- First use of the upgraded Merlin 1D engines, generating approximately 56
percent more sea-level thrust than the Merlin 1C engines used on all previous
Falcon 9 vehicles._

 _\- First use of the significantly longer first stage, which holds the
additional propellant for the more powerful engines._

 _\- The nine Merlin 1D engines on the first stage are arranged in an
octagonal pattern with eight engines in a circle and the ninth in the center._

 _\- First launch from SpaceX 's new launch facility, Space Launch Complex 4,
at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and will be the first launch over
the Pacific ocean using the facilities of the Pacific test range._

 _\- First Falcon 9 launch to carry a satellite payload for a commercial
customer, and also the first non-CRS mission. Each prior Falcon 9 launch was
of a Dragon capsule or a Dragon-shaped test article, although SpaceX has
previously successfully launched and deployed a satellite on the Falcon 1,
Flight 5 mission._

 _\- First Falcon 9 launch to have a jettisonable payload fairing, which
introduces the risk of an additional separation event._

Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9)

~~~
pbreit
It's amazing that there is so much variance from launch to launch. I realize
they are in a very progressive stage of the company but you'd still might
think there would be more commonality from launch to launch for such a error-
prone exercise.

~~~
kiba
Why would you believe that? One of the big point about Falcon 9 is how simple
it can be and how easy it is to manufacture the product.

~~~
pbreit
Because launching rockets is hard.

------
visakanv
I got goosebumps hearing all the people saying "X, go". So many people working
so hard, coming together to achieve something. Wow. Edge of my seat.

~~~
twinge
OT but you should watch
[http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/](http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/) \--
several times all the flight controllers do their checks, concluding with
"stay/no stay".

------
ramidarigaz
Interesting post from the spacex subreddit. It looks like we might get to see
a recording of the first stage return (if it works).

[http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1nd0qc/american_isla...](http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1nd0qc/american_islander_is_sailing_into_the_expected/)

~~~
trothamel
Musk's private jet is also in the area.

[http://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/N887XF](http://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/N887XF)

~~~
jpgvm
It is worth mentioning that the first stage successfully was successfully
relit. I would expect footage in the coming days of the first stage soft-
landing.

------
InclinedPlane
New launch pad. New rocket with new engines. New customers for SpaceX
(Canada). New flight profile (test of a simulated first stage return and
powered landing over the open ocean, to validate the same flight profile for
use on the Falcon 9-R with retractable landing gear).

Pretty exciting.

------
baq
slightly OT: for anybody interested in rockets i greatly recommend ignition!:
[http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf](http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)
\- a story of liquid rocket propellants. foreword by asimov, should i say
more?

~~~
eksith
What a fantastic resource! Thank you for sharing this.

A bit of an FYI for anyone else downloading: It's 223 pages, so if your Adobe
reader croaks or feels glitchy while scrolling, try Sumatra PDF instead. It
will be almost like opening a plain text document. Plus you can easily
highlight text.

    
    
      Millions of words have been written about rocketry and space travel,
      and almost as many about the history and development of the rocket.
      But if anyone is curious about the parallel history and development
      of rocket propellants — the fuels and the oxidizers that make them
      go —he will find that there is no book which will tell him what he
      wants to know. There are a few texts which describe the propellants
      currently in use, but nowhere can he learn why these and not some-
      thing else fuel Saturn V or Titan II, or SS-9. In this book I have tried
      to make that information available, and to tell the story of the de-
      velopment of liquid rocket propellants: the who, and when, and where
      and how and why of their development. The story of solid propellants
      will have to be told by somebody else.

------
ericcumbee
"Awaiting Vehicle Downlink" is that a cute way of saying buffering? Because
the flight control audio and mission clock disappear when that pops up.

~~~
eksith
Nope. That just means, they totally lost video down. I'm guessing they're
dedicating a more robust connection for actual telemetry. To be fair, the
video is mostly eyecandy. The actual meat is sensor data.

~~~
ericcumbee
Well aware of that. But given the fact that the Mission Clock and Flight
Control audio were disappearing as well.

~~~
eksith
That just means whoever does the video merge for the live stream decided
(inconsistently) that the video downlink should coincide with control room
chatter... cut out and all.

------
ZoFreX
As a software engineer currently learning test-driven development, it's
fascinating to see all the parallels in SpaceX's approach to aerospace. It's
well worth jumping back to around T-40 in the stream to hear and see lots of
what they're doing.

~~~
christiangenco
Yeah! I've thought the same thing.

Really makes you appreciate that you can re-run a failing test a hundred times
before it passes at negligible cost, while applying the same ideology to
spaceflight means tens of millions a pop at minimum.

------
cmod
If you want some extra context for the awesomeness that's happening here
(especially around the power of reusable components), try watching When We
Left Earth:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions)

It runs through the making of Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, Hubble, and the ISS.

------
syncerr
I missed take off by a few minutes. Is there a recording up yet?

~~~
InclinedPlane
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-T3KeLbuM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-T3KeLbuM)

~~~
Sunlis
Much longer version here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc)

~~~
vassvdm
Full version here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8)

Complete with the intro from SpaceX employees. Is that Elon I hear at 10:41
saying 'CE is go' ? Assuming CE means chief executive...

~~~
deletes
Apart from the deep tone the voice is different.

------
quentusrex
(T-20 Min To Webcast End) SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 Makes Its First Launch From
Vandenberg, AFB

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8)

------
Gravityloss
Interesting how the rocket is so skinny with a huge "hammerhead" payload
fairing. The upgrades to the Merlin 1 engine series seem to have worked out so
well that they have stretched Falcon 9 quite a lot. The loads in the center of
the rocket must be huge. To increase diameter, they would probably need to
invest so much more in either risk analysis, flight control, manufacturing or
transport that it wasn't deemed necessary.

(Resistance to buckling is roughly relative to rotational inertia of the cross
section, which for a circle grows with the square of radius assuming a
constant shell thickness, and the thickness would actually increase with
increasing radius because it is a pressure vessel. Also the actual bending
loads increase supralinearly with length.)

------
jpgvm
That was a surprisingly smooth ride up.

Congratulations to the SpaceX team on another massive milestone. Looking
forward to more from the Falcon 9 and Merlin 1D.

------
abcd_f
I wish they were showing more of the rocket and the launchpad than just some
heads talking about "pushing the boundaries" and some such. Let them talk, but
in the background.

~~~
mikeash
Since nothing was happening with the rocket or the pad, what purpose would
that serve?

------
yogipatel
Are they not going to cover the first stage re-entry/landing? Or am I mistaken
about what this flight was actually testing?

~~~
prawks
That's a minor part of the event from a press standpoint, the focus is the
launch. The recovery is only given a ~10% chance of being successful.

------
option_greek
All these launches seem to be so noisy (with chatter from a thousand people).
Wonder how the engineers focus on their work.

~~~
rtkwe
There's a separation between the viewing areas and the mission areas so it's
not an issue.

------
tonyarkles
I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for this launch. I worked on the
Cassiope payload about 5 years ago, and it's so awesome to know that it's
finally made it to orbit.

And it got to ride on a Falcon 9! Originally, it was meant to be strapped to
an old Soviet rocket in Kazakstan. This is so much cooler!

------
turing
Update from Musk: _" Launch was good. All satellites deployed at the targeted
orbit insertion vectors."_

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384392608350367744/photo...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/384392608350367744/photo/1)

------
pgrote
lift off. still get excited as I did as a kid when watching something like
this.

------
emp_zealoth
I've got a technical question: Does anybody have any idea what a ring that
comes off second stage nozzle right before the engine fires is? You can see it
at 1:21:27 on the SpaceX webcast

~~~
trothamel
According to
[http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/09/falcon-9-flight-1-pict...](http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/09/falcon-9-flight-1-pictures)
, it's the nozzle stiffening ring.

I'm guessing that it's there to help with handling the incredibly thin nozzle
extension in gravity, and that once the craft is in freefall (or under exhaust
pressure) it's no longer necessary.

~~~
emp_zealoth
Thank you so much, I'm nearly sure this is what I was asking about

------
ChuckMcM
Video of it (for those who missed it )
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc)

I'm looking for video of the first stage landing, you can hear them call it
out on the audio but its not in this video.

------
blackdogie
Five minutes and counting. Edge of the seat stuff. Wishing them all the
success !

------
toomuchtodo
"Picture perfect launch". Congratulations Spacex!

------
robomartin
Anyone know ETA for splash-down? Will that be streamed?

