I happened to be up late last night and saw they were webcasting the launch, which I watched. I was surprised at how excited I was by the whole thing TBH. In a world where everyone seems to be trying to create the next social network for cats it's truly exciting to see something as revolutionary and innovative as what SpaceX is doing (to the economics of launching into orbit).
I was disappointed to see the launch aborted but also impressed to see that they could abort the launch after ignition and not lose the vehicle ("safe'ing the vehicle" as they said a number of times).
Oh they made one factual error in the Webcast too (or one is on their site). A pre-launch question came up about what they look for in hiring. A representative said they must be US citizens. According to the site, you can be a US citizen or permanent resident.
> I happened to be up late last night and saw they were webcasting the launch, which I watched. I was surprised at how excited I was by the whole thing TBH.
I also watched the webcast, and few years ago I used to get up in the middle of the night to watch Space Shuttles take off and land live on NASA TV streams. It always was exciting to me. The awe and wonder of technology we use to send things into space, the joy of a successful launch, and (in case of Shuttles) the worry for the crew, because as you watched live you never knew if they'll launch/land safely or end up as a big fireball.
To quote a song[1] about the first Shuttle launch,
"Excitement so thick you could cut it with a knife
Technology...high, on the leading edge of life"
It's impressive, but a fairly standard technology for launchers to have. The Space Shuttle did the same thing five times: main engines would ignite at T-6.6 seconds, and there was a brief window until the solid rockets ignited at T-0 when sensors could safely shut down the main engines. Four times it was done at T-3, the remaining time at T-1.9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Space...
But once those SRBs were lit, it was going up, or blowing up...
While it's not a capability unique to Falcon, it's still neat that they're able to be sure every engine providing thrust is operating normally before they let it go.
I was talking with some friends who are Aerospace Phds at Stanford last night. They told me how the last few decades were sort of a "dark ages" in the Space field, that there is now a glimmer at the end of the dark tunnel.
It seems that in many ways, this launch is a make or break point in the private Space sector. For the sake of shifting our attention to truly great, ambitious endeavors, and for the sake of many great engineers who have chosen to devote their lives to a now-unsexy craft (and the many who may follow in their footsteps in the future as a result of these projects), I truly hope that this mission ends in a resounding success.
I personally haven't been this excited about a technological milestone in years.
I've been watching the private space movement for almost 20 years now -- since shortly after the Delta Clipper[1] and Clementine[2] proved to many people that low-cost innovation was genuinely possible in the fields of rocketry and space exploration.
But when I went to my first Space Access conference[3] in 1996, I can't say that I found it very encouraging. The Delta Clipper and Clementine vetrans that I met were also frequently Apollo vetrans. Brilliant, passionate engineers, but almost totally devoid of financial resources, and obviously nearing the end of their careers, if not their lives. At 19 years old I was the youngest person in the room by several decades. WIRED was regularly featuring "rockets" and "space exploration" in it's monthly "TIRED" column. I began to fear that the old dream of space -- long fostered by the likes of O'Neil, Von Braun, Oberth, and Tsiolkovsky -- would die with the previous generation, and I was arriving just in time to see its last, heroic gasp.
We have turned so many corners since then. The actual rockets are merely the most tangible results of that. What I find even more hopeful is the cultural change. Politicians as disparate as Barack Obama and Dana Rohrabacher are willing to put principles ahead of pork and advocate for the development of a robust commercial space industry. It's now possible to seriously talk about "space tourism" without people sniggering derisively and making Marvin the Martian jokes. Investors are no longer cowed by that old saw about how the best way to make a small fortune in space is to start with a large fortune. Some of the largest companies on earth are investing in asteroid mining, for goodness' sake. And most critically, young people are getting truly excited and passionate about this. (It's also extremely gratifying to see women staking out a place in the industry; the old Apollo fraternity was exclusively male.)
All in all, I have to say that the progress I've seen in the last two decades of space development is one of the things which most gives me hope for the future. And this is only the beginning.
Apparently the valve in question was a turbopump valve. I don't know how the turbopumps work in the Falcon 9, but they are a fairly interesting topic in general. For example, in the German V-2 rockets the turbopumps were steam driven. The steam for this was created with hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst; almost like a little miniature rocket engine inside of a larger one. I think this highlights just how much complexity we can forget liquid fuel rockets have.
The turbo pumps for the Space Shuttle Main Engines generate about the same horsepower as the engines of a Supercarrier -- all in the volume of a trash bin.
A quick google suggest at least one supercarrier has 280,000hp split across 4 engines. I'd love to read up on something that makes 70,000hp in the volume of a trash bin.
"The HPFTP is a three-stage centrifugal pump driven by a two-stage hot-gas turbine. It boosts the pressure of the liquid hydrogen from 1.9 to 45 MPa (276 to 6,515 psia), and operates at approximately 35,360 rpm with a power of 71,140 hp. "
I'll keep hunting for dimensions. Thanks for the tip-off to another interesting Sunday nights trawl through the internet…
The main difference to air breathing engines is that both your fuel and oxidizer are dense liquids so their volume is a thousand times less than comparable ambient air (never mind the nitrogen). Still, if you think that's a lot of power, only a few percent of the propellant is burned to run the pumps. Something like 20x burns in the main chamber, the aim being to accelerate the exhaust gases. The power of that jet can be gigawatts, though it's relatively meaningless.
I was disappointed to see the launch aborted but also impressed to see that they could abort the launch after ignition and not lose the vehicle ("safe'ing the vehicle" as they said a number of times).
Oh they made one factual error in the Webcast too (or one is on their site). A pre-launch question came up about what they look for in hiring. A representative said they must be US citizens. According to the site, you can be a US citizen or permanent resident.