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The launch live webcast link is here..
2322. This could be an interesting evening. As you know, the third launch failed at staging. It was quickly determined that the cause of this was a ‘burp’ from the Merlin engine after shutdown. There is some fuel and oxidizer left in the system when the engine shuts down, and in a regen engine there will be a bit more because the oxidizer is warmed and the nozzle cooled by running it through tubes around the outside of the bell. When they checked test data they found this had actually occurred in a ground test but the transient was ‘down in the weeds’ at sea level pressure and had not been noticed as it was perhaps only a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure and thus hidden in the 1.0 sea level pressure. At high altitude the ambient was near zero so the burp was significant. What happened then, was that after a perfect first stage burn and a flawless staging… the engine burped perhaps 2 seconds after sep and was enough to cause the first stage to ram the second stage just as it was ready to fire.
For flight four they have raised the delay from first stage cutoff to stage separation from 3 second to 5 seconds to account for this. There were no other flight anomalies of any significance on flight 3; flight 2 with the earlier Merlin regen engine has successfully staged and fired the Kestrel engine almost to second stage cut off so I am hopeful we will see a successful orbital insertion today.
2349. Fueling is in progress and near completion, or at least as near as they will go this early. The final top off will not occur until later in the launch. I am wondering if this might be partly to prevent the RP1 (kerosene) from chilling down as much as it did on a previous flight. Ah, the webcast has just now gone live.
0011. They are into the terminal count but they have been giving us loads of talking head chatter instead of the interesting stuff. I’d much rather listen to the real internal loop than people assigned to interpret to us. There is in any case only about 5 minutes to go.
0013. As you can see if you are watching the video, the tower is retracted, and we are now hearing the real control loop. 2:30 to go! Launch director gave a green, range is green, about 1 minute to go!
0018. She’s going up and looking great so far! Max Q… first stage going great. Getting close to time for pitch over and MECO.
0021. Second stage is burning beautifully!!!!!! There is no roll problem this time. Now we wait 4 minutes as she goes down range.
0022. No sign of roll anomalies like on flight 2. The slosh baffles are doing their job. 315 km high now…
0024. Almost there… the bell glows red hot but it is built for that. We now have lost signal, probably due to range.
We are waiting now for whether we got the orbital insertion…. and…. THEY HAVE DONE IT!!!!!!
0043. They are in orbit with their dummy satellite. The only things we need to hear now is whether they get a successful recovery of the 1st stage from the Pacific. It should have come down on parachutes but I don’t expect I will hear about that until ‘tomorrow’. I feel a bit like Elon… I hardly know what to say. I must admit that I was here screaming like the SpaceX employees and I now feel just limp, tired and very, very happy. So… another Falcon 1 launch latter this year and then on to the much larger Falcon 9 next year!
The SpaceX test flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle is scheduled for Sunday. That means around midnight in my part of the world and earlier in the USA.
I will be here as usual, giving a blow by blow live-blogging of the event. My gut feel says they make it this time. But that and a shiny new pound coin will get you a small cup of coffee at the local coffee shop.
Here is a very nice Q&A with Elon Musk done by the Washington Post.
2300. The launch webcast link is now up.. Coverage should start in about a half hour.
It is now officially official as the awaited press release has been officially released:
As mentioned in my update last month, we do expect to conduct a launch countdown in late September as scheduled.
Having said that, it is still possible that we encounter an issue that needs to be investigated, which would delay launch until the next available window in late October. If preparations go smoothly, we will conduct a static fire on Saturday and launch sometime between Tuesday and Thursday (California time).
The SpaceX team worked hard to make this launch window, but we also took the time to review data from Flight 3 in detail. In addition to us reviewing the data, we had several outside experts check the data and conclusions. No flight critical problems were found apart from the thrust transient issue.
Flight 5 production is well underway with an expected January completion date, Flight 6 parts are on order and Flight 7 production will begin early next year. We are now in steady state production of Falcon 1 at a rate of one vehicle every four months, which we will probably step up to one vehicle every two to three months in 2010.
– Elon Musk
I will keep you informed as news comes in and if at all possible will live blog the launch from here on the other side of the planet from Kwaj as I have on each of the previous Falcon test flights.
Monday, Sep 22: The engine test was accomplished successfully over the weekend so we are on track to see a flight 4 launch attempt later this week
Tuesday, Sep 23: The flight is scheduled for today if you are in the US, or ‘tomorrow’ if you are where I sit. Window opens around 2300 UTC and runs until 0400 UTC. That will be afternoon or evening for US readers.
Tuesday, Sep 23: They are swapping out a component in the second stage and the launch is now note expected until Sunday, Sep 28 at the earliest. Current range usage window lasts until next Wed, October 1.
Officially unofficial (as yet) information has it that SpaceX will try another test launch from Kwaj before the end of this month.
I will keep you informed.
If you are a lover of aviation history, you may want to help them out.
Bruce Dickinson, front man for the heavy metal rock group, Iron Maiden, is a qualified civil aviation pilot and was involved in flying home tourists left stranded by the collapse of a UK tourist agency. A nice story.
Of course, if I am on a flight that Bruce is piloting, I’ll insist he plays something really, really loud during takeoff. Go Bruce!
The National Space Society held a press event at the National Press Club today in conjunction with the Discovery Channel to announce the results of power beaming tests carried out in the Hawaiian Islands earlier this year, between January and April. The testing was funded and filmed by the Discovery Channel as an episode of an eight part ‘Discovery Project Earth’ series and should be airing tonight in the US.
The briefing was given by John C. Mankins, COO of Managed Energy Technologies LLC who actually built and carried out the tests and shared the podium with Mark Hopkins, Senior Vice President of the National Space Society. The house was packed, standing room only with more people in the hallway,.according to an attendee whom I interviewed.
John Mankins and his crew built a portable and modular energy transmission system for under a million dollars. This was not just a technological feasiblity study. We have known for decades that it is possible to transmit power via microwaves over long distances. What the Mankins test showed was how it can be done in a real world situation. They had to work around bureaucratic approvals which limited the total power; they had to deal with tribal religious requirements that nothing be left on the sacred volcano over night and they had to build equipment that could be carried to a site, plugged together, aimed and turned on.
They succeeded. 1 watt of power was beamed from a portable antenna on Maui to a small receiving antenna on Hawaii, 147 kilometers away.
The equipment was not engineered for efficiency nor high power, both of which are possible. Mankins and the Discovery Channel team have succeeded in what they set out to do: they have an iconic real world demonstration that shows the key technology behind Geosynchronous Solar Power Satellites works.
I thought I would let all of you be the first to know I have won my election bid to the National Space Society Board of Directors.
The last time I served on the board it was still called the L5 Society 🙂
As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick – the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues – this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:
Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — BAA Ltd., the owner of London’s Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.
The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was “flawed.”
Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.
Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.
I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial’s lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA’s management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.
The C-130 based laser you have read about here seems to be doing quite well in testing, and although I have not yet read a document on the topic, there are at least some who would like it deployed to Iraq. The weapon is even better than I had thought it would be. No, let us be truthful. I am stunned at the capabilities they are demonstrating. According to a Wired article (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds):
According to the developers, the accuracy of this weapon is little short of supernatural. They claim that the pinpoint precision can make it lethal or non-lethal at will. For example, they say it can either destroy a vehicle completely, or just damage the tires to immobilize it. The illustration shows a theoretical 26-second engagement in which the beam deftly destroys “32 tires, 11 Antennae, 3 Missile Launchers, 11 EO devices, 4 Mortars, 5 Machine Guns” — while avoiding harming a truckload of refugees and the soldiers guarding them.
The author goes on at length about claims the weapon could be used for plausibly deniable standoff attacks. It is my belief he is being insufficiently creative when he imagines what such attacks would entail. One might take out a communications facility by targeting a turnbuckle on an antenna guy wire; or a power plant by blowing away a standoff and dropping a high voltage line onto others; or perhaps blowing a hole in an oil filled transformer. I can easily think of ways of disabling infrastructure with this device in ways that would leave enemy repair crews terribly puzzled.
You just have to think outside the box: new weapons imply new definitions of the possible.
Spacex has released the full high definition video of the flight from liftoff through the first stage impact on the second stage, complete with audio signal. It is really worth watching!
Earlier this afternoon Perry and I had a lengthy editorial telephone discussion on the subject of Georgia. While we agreed broadly there was one area in which we had intense debate until I finally figured out how we were talking past each other.
The question is, how the hell did US intelligence assets miss the Russian Black Sea fleet movements? How did they miss the massive transport job of the troops and their logistical tail? They did not just materialize in position. It takes time and planning to make such moves. I will leave the detail of that to Perry as he seems to have been thinking about it in great detail.
My take is there is a limited amount of time available on the black satellites. The manpower and resources have been re-targeted on the Middle East. Orbits have been shifted to give maximal coverage in those areas of interest and experienced personnel have moved to ‘where the action is’.
This is not to say Russia is being ignored. It is however a very big place and I am going to guess that the time between scanning particular areas has greatly lengthened. Russian troop movements are mainly rail based and with enough eyeballs and Cold War era periodic coverage one might hope to pick up changes in traffic patterns and notice “something is going on”. But… this requires a certain periodicity in coverage. Changes in static positions like silos and strategic air bases are much easier to pick up even with occasional coverage. Dynamic changes, such as train and road movements are a different story. You have to have a satellite taking pictures at just the right time or often enough to pick up a signal just by chance.
This is what took Perry and I awhile to meet minds on: I have been thinking of this issue as a communications/information theory problem. How often do you have to sample an area to notice a change in the density of train traffic? I would posit it would have to be several times a week at the very least if the spike in traffic was huge and extended; if the spike were smaller and flatter you would need to sample daily or multiple times daily. You would have to do it at night and through clouds as well if you were to get a statistical value high enough to ring alarm bells. It is an issue of sampling rate versus the highest detectable signal frequency, pure and simple.
I doubt they have even been scanning large areas of Russia more than a few times a week (I suspect much less often) except in areas of nuclear strategic interest. They could easily miss large troop movements in a part of Russia which is not of great national interest to the United States.
Let the discussion begin. There is a lot of meat on this bone!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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