First Falcon 9 Block 5 Launch Tomorrow

[Yazata]

This is the first flight of the newest (and supposedly the final) version of the Falcon 9, designed to fly more like an airliner, something like 10 times with minimum refurbishment between flights. (Elon Musk says he wants to fly each one maybe 100 times, but that may be another one of his "aspirational" estimates.)

This is the last planned version of the falcon 9, since SpaceX is reassigning their engineers to working on the new BFR (designed to take up to 100 people anywhere in the solar system).

It's 2018! We should already have interplanetary spaceships by now!  

No thinking small at SpaceX.

The launch window tomorrow starts at 4:12 p.m. EDT, 1:12 p.m.. PDT (20:12 UTC)  and runs for about two hours. If the launch doesn't take place tomorrow, there's another window on Friday.

SpaceX plans to livestream the launch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYJWeK-kVB0

http://www.spacex.com/webcast

The plan tomorrow is to launch from Cape Canaveral, put a satellite into geostationary orbit, then land the booster on SpaceX's robot barge ("droneship") out in the Atlantic.

[C C]

[...] This is the last planned version of the falcon 9, since SpaceX is reassigning their engineers to working on the new BFR (designed to take up to 100 people anywhere in the solar system).

It's 2018! We should already have interplanetary spaceships by now!  

Yep, everything in *2001: A Space Odyssey* might have actually been the case in the actual year (barring Black Monoliths) if there had been a business-driven rather than government-dominated interest in outer space (and the excessive social, environmental, safety, etc standards it eventually had to time-consumingly accommodate and fund as a state role model).

But OTOH, without the government's endless river of taxpayer money to pour into that initial pioneering work and its Cold War contest, military defense & spy technology concerns... Difficult to imagine the commercial sector all on its own forging and laying the essential starting foundation back then (getting the ball rolling under considerable sacrifices and losses).

There was much apathy about space-travel in the general population of that vintage era. Even with the kids, there were more of them watching macho television westerns for entertainment than something like *Star Trek* or (grimace) *Lost In Space*. No ubiquitous computer games making geek-stuff and its sci-fi passions palatable to the larger crowd. The threat of "the commies", national pride, and whupping them in a space-contest turned the traditional public opinion about it from being "wasteful journey into fantasy land" into something that seemed essential to the survival of the republic.

~

[Yazata]

I just looked in on SpaceX's website and the webcast hasn't started yet. They are now saying anticipated launch time is 2:47 PDT, 5:47 EDT, 21:47 UTC.

[...] This is the last planned version of the falcon 9, since SpaceX is reassigning their engineers to working on the new BFR (designed to take up to 100 people anywhere in the solar system).

It's 2018! We should already have interplanetary spaceships by now!  

Yep, everything in *2001: A Space Odyssey* might have actually been the case in the actual year (barring Black Monoliths) if there had been a business-driven rather than government-dominated interest in outer space (and the excessive social, environmental, safety, etc standards it eventually had to time-consumingly accommodate and fund as a state role model).

But OTOH, without the government's endless river of taxpayer money to pour into that initial pioneering work and its Cold War contest, military defense & spy technology concerns... Difficult to imagine the commercial sector all on its own forging and laying the essential starting foundation back then (getting the ball rolling under considerable sacrifices and losses).

I agree. I still think that public-private cooperation is the best way to do it.

But somehow, during the Spaceshuttle years, NASA became totally risk averse.

Back in the Mercury, Gemeni and Apollo years everyone knew that space travel was dangerous and people could get killed. The astronauts knew that (most of them were bad-ass former test pilots) and willingly took the risk in order to accomplish something cool. Even the very first flight of the Shuttle was a manned flight.

Then they lost a shuttle and the reaction was prosecutorial, it was to try to pin the blame on somebody who was forced to sit in front of the hot lights, questioned and judged guilty. So all the NASA executives saw that if they ever lost a flight, it would mean the end of their careers.

So instead of the audacious (and inevitably risky) vision of the continued exploration of the solar system (and holding the imagination of the whole planet) the government funding sources became a disfunctional zero-risk speed-brake on the whole thing and let world-wide interest in space exploration wither and die.

Perhaps the key to the future of space travel is to hire more engineers and fewer lawyers.

[Yazata]

Today's launch attempt counted down to t-58 seconds, when the on-board computer suddenly ordered an abort.

The computer does thousands of checks millisecond by millisecond, and the engineers were scouring the error readouts trying to figure out what was out of specification.

It's complicated since the vehicle is full of propellant and liquid oxygen and then pressurized and procedures have to kick in to make it safe.

That makes a launch today difficult even if they figure out and correct what the on-board computer didn't like, so they are "recycling" 24 hours to their backup launch window about the same time tomorrow.

[Yazata]

The reason for yesterday's abort seems to have been very minor. There was nothing wrong with the rocket, the problem was a cranky telemetry link. The reason for that was on the ground, caused by a test of the data links a day earlier that failed to reset properly.

The rocket launched today and everything seems to have worked well. The satellite is still on its way to its high geosynchronous orbit but there's no reason to think that anything will go wrong with that. The booster returned and despite condensation in the booster's video camera and an intermittent video link that interrupted the live video, landed intact right in the middle of the "drone ship" out in the Atlantic as planned. The photos of it after it returned showed it looking surprisingly clean and ready to fuel up and have another go. (Quick turn-around is supposed to be the block-5's thing.)

Update: The second stage executed a second burn to put the satellite into its desired orbit, the orbit was confirmed as good and the satellite separated and deployed successfully.

So everything (except the on-board camera) seems to have worked very well on Block-5's first launch.