Right here:
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
Prolly link to that one again, so I'ma leavin' the URL blank.
For those of you not watching Seattle crush the Panthers. Or at least, those of you watching two screens at once. thenewgreen
The satellite to Falcon 9: "Thanks for the ride man. Good luck on the way back. Break a leg out there."
Let's see if I can do this. A flight from Chicago to Atlanta is about $100 on Southwest. Southwest uses Boeing 737's, that run $50-$80 MIllion depending on what options you get. This is about the same as a Falcon 9 Launch, rumored to cost $60-70 million per launch. So, keep that in your head a second. Chicago to Atlanta is about $100 per passenger, and a 737 sits 186 passengers in a max, short haul, configuration. Let's say 180 to keep the math simple. This plane can make three of these runs in a 24 hour period. That is $54,000 is airfare in a 24 hour period. This is not including the costs of fuel, pilots, grounds personnel, luggage handlers etc. I have zero clue how much of that is operating profit and how much is paying to keep the plane in the air. There are 365 days in a year, and assuming a perfect flight history, no weather cancellations, etc, my math says that you get just shy of $19 million in income from this plane in a year. Over a period of 10-15 years this plane can generate $250 million in operating income. Again this is not profit, just income. Now, imagine this same flight is on a plane that we crash into the runway and can only use once. Those same 180 paying passengers now have to pony up the $50 million for the cost of the plane EACH TIME THEY FLY. You cannot amortize the costs of flight over a decade. Each plane ticket now runs north of $250,000. The plane cannot be recovered at the end of the flight, it cannot be salvaged and then for your return flight you have to wait for the airline to assemble the next plane in Atlanta for your flight home. Space flight now throws the plane away every time it is used. This is why sending stuff into orbit is so expensive. The hope with SpaceX and Blue Origin and Sierra et al, is to reuse the rockets. Just like reusing the planes in aviation makes the tickets affordable, using a highly engineered piece of airframe more than once has the potential to drop the costs per launch by a factor of 10-100 depending on who you talk to. If you can get the cost of launching stuff into orbit down by half, that opens up a HUGE market that is now cost prohibitive. The Jason-3 satellite paid roughly $82 million for the launch on a mission that is wourth roughly $250 million in total. What if for that same $82 million, they could afford a bigger rocket to make the satellite larger? OR pay for two launches as the second satellite could be made from spare parts for not much additional costs? The Europa Mission being planned out right now is budgeting $250 million in launch costs, not including the spacecraft, ground support, communication fees etc. This is why this is so exciting. There are many, many missions that simply cannot afford to launch that a reusable launch system suddenly makes viable. And more stuff in space is a great thing.
I believe I read that that version of the Falcon-9 was being retired anyway, and this was to be its last flight in any case. Don't quote me on that, though.
Wow, I yelled at this event like some Americans do with football. How convenient that the livestream from the camera on the landing barge cut out seconds before the stage 1 was set to enter the frame! And I know that they always release the footage, but naw, it crashed. I'm calling it now. Landing on a barge in 10-15 ft. ocean swells isn't the easiest thing. Re: nopeSeattle crush the Panthers
Sad that both the drone feed and the satellite feed dropped right before we saw any action. But exciting nonetheless.
I've been on big ships at sea where the cranes would occasionally block satellite feeds to the ship. I'm very interested in seeing if the rocket coming in blocked the data link feed. Being 200 miles off shore the only way they got anything was satellites to the south of them.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/688799901463883776 "First stage on target at droneship but looks like hard landing; broke landing leg. Primary mission remains nominal"
I'm envisioning a FutureBarge™ with the landing platform kept at constant height, built off of a barge that rocks with the sea. Obviously from the frame of the person driving the barge, the platform would appear to grow and shrink in height inversely to the motion of the ocean (lol sexjokes), but then when you tie the thing down after it lands, you can then marry the two reference frames.
I was thinking along those lines as I was watching the horizon wobble on the webcam. Large international ships have their own sort of native stabilization, but a barge, even a football field one, won't. But these days we've got buildings that can adapt to earthquakes and gloves that can handle Parkinson's. So, let's get on it.
Like almost every tech, it's only a matter of time.
It's a neat satellite. Mission Page It is designed to monitor ocean heights, waves and surface winds.
fingers crossed for the barge landing Launching in a fog, nice! Edit: as an audio guy, you might be mortified to see that the audio isn't sync'd to video. Several hundred ms delay. Edit2: they fixed it. I love this company.