> If the stage successfully lands on the platform, Musk said, it could potentially fly again. He put the odds of success at no greater than 50 percent for this particular attempt, but was more optimistic about the company’s chances of landing on the platform on a future mission.
> “There’s at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months,” Musk said. “I think it’s quite likely — probably 80 to 90 percent likely — that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.”
In 1935, U.S. Adm. William H. Standley saw a British demonstration of the Royal Navy's new remote-control aircraft for target practice, the DH 82B Queen Bee. Back stateside, Standley charged Commander Delmer Fahrney with developing something similar for the Navy. "Fahrney adopted the name 'drone' to refer to these aircraft in homage to the Queen Bee," Mr. Zaloga wrote. The term fit, as a drone could only function when controlled by an operator on the ground or in a "mother" plane.
A stern googling will get you the Wall Street Journal article this comes from. If I link it, they won't let you read it.
Which is why, being an RC aircraft hobbyist myself, I can't stand when other RC hobbyists make the ludicrous revisionist argument that "drone" only refers to either autonomous vehicles or weaponized military vehicles. It's an extremely common argument in the RC community, and it's patently ridiculous.
Notwithstanding the other replies, there are no authoritative sources for word definitions in living languages. Words mean what their users intend.
A relatively recent example of this is the word 'literally' which used to, and still does, mean 'in the literally sense; exactly' but has also come to mean 'not literally true' when used for emphasis, as in: I have received literally thousands of emails).
This is going to be epic. It really gives me a sense of living in the movies I used to watch as science fiction as a kid.
Even more interesting for me was he tweeted the X-wings [1] which make total sense. On re-entry you don't need to burn fuel to provide attitude stabilization and drag if you can do that aerodynamically. I realize the first test failed due to an out of control spin, but if you remember the old rotary rocket days you may note that one could use reentry to spin up the F-9 then flip the pitch on the x-wings to provide an auto-rotation type of re-entry into the denser atmosphere. That would save fuel needed for the landing.
What is the cost/technical feasibility of SpaceX being able to broadcast this landing live? The barge will be miles out to sea where there are no cell towers, so how difficult would it be and how much would it cost to stream a video from the middle of the Atlantic?
They won't do it live unless they are _really_ sure it will work.
Even if it's just a test that they know has a reasonable chance of failing, that's not how it will be portrayed in the mainstream media (see: the F9R-dev RUD)
I'm pretty sure they could send the live video signal up to a communications satellite in geostationary orbit. That satellite would relay the signal to a base station which would then broadcast it however they normally do.
There are lots of comsats in GEO; no doubt some of them are open to doing a deal, but I don't know the cost. Maybe an international TV news network would be willing to do it "for free" so long as they get exclusive access?
Or they could just use an airplane to relay to signal. The technology isn't really the issue. The issue is they don't want to release a video of a rocket crashing into a barge (or the ocean next to a barge). They know such a video would be replayed in mainstream media without the "this was just a test that only had a 50/50 shot of working in the first place" context. Especially after F9R-Dev, an Antares, and SS2 all RUD'd in the past couple months.
That being said, they have announced that there will be cameras on the barge. The fact that they have announced that ahead of time makes it very likely we will see at least some footage in the days or weeks after the attempt (they'll just want to do it in a PR controlled way).
Before cellphones there was this technology called TV. Which has been broadcasting live from around the world for decades. I think they can figure it out.
Instead of spending valuable propellant on a boostback burn to get to the launch site, they'll just partially refuel the spent lower stage on the barge and have it fly itself back to the launch site. This'll improve their maximum payload, and possibly save money.
>they'll just partially refuel the spent lower stage on the barge and have it fly itself back to the launch site.
given the capabilities of the stage, wouldn't it basically be a suborbital hyper-transport - they can fly it from any point A to point B, like from SF to Honk-Kong must faster than Concorde.
That's very hard. The hop it does is just a few hundred kilometers. ISS orbits at around 300 km height. Just crossing the atlantic would require 6000 km horizontal travel. So 20x horzontal vs vertical. If you want to avoid the radiation belts, you need a relatively shallow trajectory. The velocity needed is near orbital.
High ICBM trajectories have issues...
71% of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans so it would only make sense to make launch and land platforms on the oceans. Not only for the space but for the safety; if a launch needs to be aborted, or has a catastrophic failure (see; explosion) the harmful debris won't come raining down on the population.
That's why the U.S. launch sites are located on the coasts: Wallops Island, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg AFB. They all launch vehicles away from CONUS.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadhttp://www.spacenews.com/article/launch-report/42305next-fal...
Looks like the Bayes is strong with Musk:
> If the stage successfully lands on the platform, Musk said, it could potentially fly again. He put the odds of success at no greater than 50 percent for this particular attempt, but was more optimistic about the company’s chances of landing on the platform on a future mission.
> “There’s at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months,” Musk said. “I think it’s quite likely — probably 80 to 90 percent likely — that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.”
The scheduled date is Dec 16:
http://spacexstats.com/mission.php?launch=19
A stern googling will get you the Wall Street Journal article this comes from. If I link it, they won't let you read it.
Bees are both airborne (not seaborne) and make a notable (droning) sound in flight.
Old English-->Male Bee
from the German --> Droning sound
Although bees aren't remote control via a computer chip, they are generally seen as being commanded by the queen :)
A relatively recent example of this is the word 'literally' which used to, and still does, mean 'in the literally sense; exactly' but has also come to mean 'not literally true' when used for emphasis, as in: I have received literally thousands of emails).
Words!
Even more interesting for me was he tweeted the X-wings [1] which make total sense. On re-entry you don't need to burn fuel to provide attitude stabilization and drag if you can do that aerodynamically. I realize the first test failed due to an out of control spin, but if you remember the old rotary rocket days you may note that one could use reentry to spin up the F-9 then flip the pitch on the x-wings to provide an auto-rotation type of re-entry into the denser atmosphere. That would save fuel needed for the landing.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/22/space-x-x-wing-rocket-drone...
Even if it's just a test that they know has a reasonable chance of failing, that's not how it will be portrayed in the mainstream media (see: the F9R-dev RUD)
There are lots of comsats in GEO; no doubt some of them are open to doing a deal, but I don't know the cost. Maybe an international TV news network would be willing to do it "for free" so long as they get exclusive access?
That being said, they have announced that there will be cameras on the barge. The fact that they have announced that ahead of time makes it very likely we will see at least some footage in the days or weeks after the attempt (they'll just want to do it in a PR controlled way).
"Base is 300 ft by 100 ft, with wings that extend width to 170 ft. Will allow refuel & rocket flyback in future."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/536263260056850432
Instead of spending valuable propellant on a boostback burn to get to the launch site, they'll just partially refuel the spent lower stage on the barge and have it fly itself back to the launch site. This'll improve their maximum payload, and possibly save money.
given the capabilities of the stage, wouldn't it basically be a suborbital hyper-transport - they can fly it from any point A to point B, like from SF to Honk-Kong must faster than Concorde.
That's why the U.S. launch sites are located on the coasts: Wallops Island, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg AFB. They all launch vehicles away from CONUS.