It is a fast moving world we live in and much has happened in the week or so since I last posted on this topic.
John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, believes they have an understanding of and cure for the ‘hard starting’ problem their Pixel and Texel rocket test articles exhibited in their attempts at the Moon Lander prize at Alamogordo this last October. The hard starts damaged several of their motors and even cracked the bell in one of them. They have a new igniter they are testing which may solve the problems.
There is much news at SpaceX after a long period of silence. They have tested their Falcon 9 first stage on a test stand with two engines. They will soon test three engines and work their way up to the full complement of nine. This is a big rocket and requires a BFTS for testing. Elon Musk claims this stands for Big Falcon Test Stand: that is his story and he is sticking to it.
Development of the Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine has been completed. The third Falcon 1 test flight will use this engine instead of the ablatively cooled engine used on the first two test flights. An exact date for the Kwajalein launch has not been announced but it is now scheduled for somewhere in the April-June time frame.
Ground breaking has occurred at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral site, the former SLC-40 pad , once used for Titan-IV launches.
SpaceX has passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) with NASA on their COTS (Cheap Orbital Transport Systems or Commercial Off The Shelf) contract to perform resupply to Space Station Alpha. By 2010 SpaceX is to demonstrate cargo deliveries using the combination of a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule. The Dragon capsule will carry passengers after it has flown a few times.
I could go on. but there is just so much happening at SpaceX I can only recommend you read their update and if you have any questions about the technology, come back here and ask.
But wait! There’s more!
Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two inflatable space station test articles in orbit, is making its move:
Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station.
“Those [first] six launches will be comprised of two missions to deploy hardware such as Sundancer itself and our node/bus combination and four missions to dedicated to transporting crew and cargo,” Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace said in a written statement.
“Subsequently our launch rate will double, and we will require a dozen launches, all for crew and cargo transportation missions over the next 12-month period. Our third year of active operations will again require another dozen crew and cargo mission launches and, in our fourth year of operations, we anticipate needing 18 such launches.”
Things are moving so quickly it is just astounding to an old spacer like myself.
I am really not sure what is up with the date on the SpaceX update btw… I check them at least once a week if not more often and have not seen their item before last night. Perhaps it was embargoed for a couple months; perhaps someone forgot to publish; perhaps it has the wrong date; or perhaps I hallucinated the old update page…
The Bigelow stuff is really cool – I stand by, ready and willing to eat my hat/words/unpleasant stuff of choice.
So is the plan for them to use the SpaceX crew option and have people working on the final assembly? If so that’s amazing news.
I am still worried that SpaceX will start to hit some walls and have problems that will derail this stuff. There have been so many false dawns on space development that I can’t get excited even by good news.
This is all very very exciting 🙂
I am sorry, going slightly off topic I guess, but think of what is happening.
All of the following are being put in place as we write – cheap, consumer cheap, orbital flight with multiple competing providers, kilo qbit quantum computing technology, cheap cheap cheap energy courtesy of Bussard fusion, multi million device dynamically reconfigurable logic circuits.
With these as examples, I have no hesitation in predicting we will see the same level of technological change in the next ten years as we have seen in the last thirty.
And this is just from the USA, god knows what will happen when India and China are able to make a contribution even fractionally commensurate to their population sizes.
Exponentials work, we have now reached the takeoff point.
The singularity commeth.
Bussard Fusion is a world-changing technology– if it works. It’s that big if that has me chewing my nails right now 🙂
Bussard Fusion is a world-changing technology
So is this(Link)
And the really nerve wracking thing about Bussard is we are only months from knowing one way or the other.
Dale, Would the John Carmack you mention be the same one that was (and still is to some degree I believe) the Quake games? The names for the test articles you mention (Pixel and Texel) lead me to believe that he is.
There should be a ‘responsible for’ somewhere in that last comment, I’ll leave you to figure out where.
Yes.