Falcon Heavy Test Flight

[Glom]

Apogee and perigee.

Just sayin'

[ka9q]

Here's a message I sent out at the time with some element sets I found for the parking orbit.

starman
1 43205U 18017A   18037.94189123  .00000283 -50857-6  00000+0 0  9991
2 43205  29.0185 287.3580 3404246 180.0270 180.5840  8.75540848    00

Or in readable AMSAT format:

NORAD 43,205
COSPAR 18017A
Eccentricity 0.3404246
Inclination, deg 29.0185
RA of Node, deg 287.3580
Arg of Perigee, deg 180.0270
Mean Anomaly, deg 180.5840
Mean Motion, r/day 8.75540848
Period, min 164.46976783
Semimajor axis, m 9,943,769.1
Apogee, m 6,950,737.7
Perigee, m 180,530.5
Ndot, r/day^2 0.00000283
Ndotdot, r/day^3 -0.00000051
Epoch age, days 0.090389
Epoch 18037.94189123
06 Feb 2018 22:36:19.402272 UTC

Confirmed by visual observation from San Diego before and during earth escape burn

NB: these elements were PRIOR to the burn and are no longer valid

Today I found a slightly younger version, but these are also for the parking orbit before the escape burn:


1 43205U 18017A   18038.05572533 +.00020608 -51169-6 +11058-3 0  9994
2 43205 029.0165 287.1006 3403068 180.4827 179.1544 08.75117793000017

[smartcooky]

A friend of mine, who knows I am a space nerd, sent me a link to this, and I thought it was worth sharing here.

For those who are fans of James Horner's movie scores, in particular, his outstanding score for Ron Howard's "Apollo 13", I think you will enjoy this...

[Dalhousie]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

[smartcooky]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

A stunt? Really?

Its sad that you feel that way.

Would you have preferred they launch a slab of concrete instead, or perhaps risk someone's multi-million dollar satellite on a test flight that could have blown up on the launch pad?

[molesworth]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

A stunt? Really?

Its sad that you feel that way.

Would you have preferred they launch a slab of concrete instead, or perhaps risk someone's multi-million dollar satellite on a test flight that could have blown up on the launch pad?

Indeed!  I was just about to say the same thing.

Plus, the huge amount of publicity has helped inspire a lot of young people to think about their futures as being in space, science and technology, which is definitely a good outcome, whatever you might think about the "stunt" aspect of launching a car.

(Anyway, I thought it was cool and fun  )

[Zakalwe]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

If you weren't inspired by the sight of the two boosters simultaneously landing back at the launch site then you aren't easily affected by much!
Personally I thought that Starman was a great touch....the views were spectacular and I loved the whole sheer spectacle of it. If you went to someone 20 years ago and said that in the near future we'd have a quixotic billionaire trying to set up a Mars colony and in doing so he built the first reusable boosters that fly themselves back to their base, and in the first test of his new heavy booster he'd send an electric car into orbit as a laugh, they'd look at you with both envy and awe.

[Jason Thompson]

It wasn't a stunt, it was a test launch of a new booster. It's a shame people are so hung up about the imagery of a spacecman in a car and can't appreciate the actual purpose. It wasn't done to put a car into space, it was done to show the cabailities of a new, reusable rocket system, and it succeeded.

[jfb]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

Apples to kumquats.  Apollo 13 was a mission gone wrong, with extremely high cost for failure; the FH test flight was, well, a test flight with a whimsical mass simulator, and there was a non-zero chance it would kaboom on the pad.   

While I personally wouldn't use the word "inspiring" for the FH flight myself, it was exciting, and Starman was a pretty epic gag. 

[smartcooky]

If you went to someone 20 years ago and said that in the near future we'd have a quixotic billionaire trying to set up a Mars colony and in doing so he built the first reusable boosters that fly themselves back to their base, and in the first test of his new heavy booster he'd send an electric car into orbit as a laugh, they'd look at you with both envy and awe.

And shortly afterwards, they would be calling in the nice young men in their white coats!

[Glom]

Unlike this stunt, Apollo 13 was actually inspiring

A stunt? Really?

Its sad that you feel that way.

Would you have preferred they launch a slab of concrete instead, or perhaps risk someone's multi-million dollar satellite on a test flight that could have blown up on the launch pad?

Indeed!  I was just about to say the same thing.

Plus, the huge amount of publicity has helped inspire a lot of young people to think about their futures as being in space, science and technology, which is definitely a good outcome, whatever you might think about the "stunt" aspect of launching a car.

(Anyway, I thought it was cool and fun  )

Noooo. I don't need the competition.

Though the other effect is an expansion of general interest leading to an expansion of the market leading to more demand for lil ole me.

[smartcooky]

SpaceX have just gone one better, landing all three boosters, with centre core executing the longest downrange landing so far at 900km. Gosh, these guys make this look easy.

However, I have a couple of questions for the aerospace experts here

1. SpaceX talk about the landing of the centre core being particularly challenging. Is this because it burns for longer, therefore achieves a greater velocity, and therefore the re-entry is faster? Are there also other aspects that make it more challenging?

2. The payload size for a single Falcon 9 can reach a point where it would be required to expend the core. Am I right in suggesting that they ought never need to expend a core on a Falcon 9 flight, because any flight that would need this could simply be flown on Falcon Heavy, where all three cores can be recovered - effectively getting more than 90% of their hardware back.

[ka9q]

I don't know for sure, but it certainly seems like anything flown on an expendable F9 could be flown on a fully recovered F9H. But I'd have to check the handbook. Launch vehicles generally have published user's handbooks that show payload capacity as a function of orbital apogee, perigee and inclination. For the F9, this would also specify which components are recovered or expended.

Last I looked, though, the F9 handbook didn't have a lot of the information I'd seen in the handbooks for other launch vehicles.

It remains to be seen exactly when a recovered F9H would be more economical than an expended F9. The economics of recovery depend on both the failure rate and the cost of refurbishment. If you lose just one of the three first stages of a F9H, as happened in the first flight, you're already worse off than had you flown a deliberately expended F9.

[VQ]

I don't know for sure, but it certainly seems like anything flown on an expendable F9 could be flown on a fully recovered F9H. But I'd have to check the handbook. Launch vehicles generally have published user's handbooks that show payload capacity as a function of orbital apogee, perigee and inclination. For the F9, this would also specify which components are recovered or expended.

Last I looked, though, the F9 handbook didn't have a lot of the information I'd seen in the handbooks for other launch vehicles.

It remains to be seen exactly when a recovered F9H would be more economical than an expended F9. The economics of recovery depend on both the failure rate and the cost of refurbishment. If you lose just one of the three first stages of a F9H, as happened in the first flight, you're already worse off than had you flown a deliberately expended F9.

Particularly if the F9 boosters are not infinitely refurbishable. If reliability is not a concern, the end-of-life boosters could be used for the final, non-recovery high payload launches.

[bknight]

Congratulations to SpaceX and their FH, recovering both boosters and the center core, then delivering the paid spacecraft into geo stationary orbit.