Falcon Heavy Roars To Life
First static fire test of Falcon Heavy complete–one step closer to first test flight! pic.twitter.com/EZF4JOT8e4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 24, 2018
Falcon Heavy hold-down firing this morning was good. Generated quite a thunderhead of steam. Launching in a week or so. pic.twitter.com/npaqatbNir
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 24, 2018
It lives Igor, it lives!
Way to go SpaceX! Re-check everything, and light that candle!
Ad LEO! Ad Luna! Ad Ares! AD ASTRA!
Congratulations! Now to see it fly the roadster to space!
I’d love to see the “tire marks” THIS would make!
— btw, what would be the horsepower under that puppy’s hood?
Nice!
Just so we’re clear if this manages to lift off the pad and not explode into several million pieces it is then destined for where Mars would place it, correct? Mars won’t actually be there. Due to the timing of the launch being off by a year and a half.
That’s what it sounds like. The statements from Mr. Musk and SpaceX haven’t exactly been crystal clear. But it should be going to the orbit of Mars, but Mars won’t be there at the time. The timing is only about three months off, not a year and a half, but that’s more than enough for a huge distance.
Agreed. “Going to Mars” sounds a lot cooler than “solar orbit with its aphelion at the same distance as Mars’ orbit”. Besides, how many journalists, let alone readers, are going to know what aphelion means?
But you probably want the aphelion to be less than Mars orbit so there no contamination risk from it impacting. This is something the folks who are opposed to space commerce are already complaining about.
https://www.theverge.com/20…
Is Elon Musk even allowed to send his car to deep space?
By Loren Grush
“Musk initially said he wanted to send the car to Mars orbit, which could raise concerns about planetary protection. That’s the concept of preventing contamination of worlds in our Solar System with Earth life. Honoring planetary protection is a matter of international law, as it’s mandated in the Outer Space Treaty — a 50-year-old document that dictates guidelines for what countries can and cannot do in space.”
This isn’t a hard requirement to meet. There are software packages for calculating a spacecraft’s (or an asteroid’s or a Tesla roadster’s ) trajectory to very high precision. They include all sorts of things, like the very slight perturbations from the gravity of the larger asteroids. That’s a stock part of spacecraft navigation.
For this sort of problem, you just feed that software the expected position and velocity of the object at a given time, and it tells you what will happen to it (hit Earth, hit Mars, what orbit it’s in if it’s still there, etc.) If NASA’s Planetary Protection Office says, “Don’t hit Mars within the next 100 years,” you run the calculation forward 100 years. On modern computers, that doesn’t take much CPU time.
Then, since the launch isn’t 100% precise, you do it again with slightly different input velocity, position and time (usually a random difference, representative of delivery accuracy and length of the launch window.) Repeat a million times (I said it didn’t take much CPU time for each run.) Based on the statistics of the results, you go back to the planetary protection people and say, “The probability of hitting Mars in the next 100 years is X, is that low enough?”
That’s an approach the Planetary Protection office expects. Since SpaceX is interested in actually sending things to Mars, they are either already set up to do this sort of calculation or they need to get set up to do it for other reasons.
Close enough.
That sounded beautiful and was more exciting than Christmas.
Some of the more distant videos gave a better impression of the start-up sequence, a distinct popcorn ripple as engine pairs came on line.
https://twitter.com/nova_ro…
Ha. That is a crazy sounding start sequence! Thanks for sharing!
I got used to it last year, which was 39a’s most active year ever with Falcon 9
I wish the Falcon Heavy could be launched asap. This has launch has been long overdue but now that the ground test has been completed the launching can hardly be awaited,this is what we’ve all been wanting and needing for some time. GO FOR LAUNCH and GODSPEED Mighty Falcon!!!!
They went back to SLC 40 for single stick F9 but they had over a dozen launches at 39a last year IIRC