Spacex Falcon 9

SpaceX, the company run and founded by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, has successfully completed a vertical take-off and vertical landing (VTVL) with its Falcon 9 rocket after delivering a payload of commercial satellites, setting a new landmark in space travel technology.

•  The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida with 11 communication satellites for customer OrbComm Inc and successfully deployed them in space.
•   The reusable main-stage booster then turned around and landed safely near its launchpad at Cape Canaveral.
•   With this, Falcon 9 becomes the first space rocket to land successfully on earth after launching a commercial payload in space.
•   It will bring down operational costs. Space X has proved that its rockets can be refurbished and re-flown for commercial purposes.
•  The SpaceX feat is important, given that this is the first time that an orbital rocket has come back to Earth intact. The rocket reached a height of approximately 200 kms before it landed back on earth, and it is this high altitude which made the company’s mission so difficult.

Comparision of Falcon 9 with New Shepard

•  Falcon 9 is a bigger, more powerful rocket than Blue Origins’ New Shepard, which entered the earth’s orbit in November and successfully landed back. Blue Origins is funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
•  Falcon 9’s first stage is powered by nine Merlin engines, each one being much more powerful than the Blue Shepard which has one BE-3 engine. Each Merlin engine can emit 756 kilonewtons (170,000 pounds) of thrust at liftoff, while the BE-3 has a thrust of 110,000 pounds at liftoff. The total mass of the Falcon 9 is 541,300 kg or 1,194,000 pounds; the greater the mass of a rocket, the greater is the amount of thrust required to take-off into space.
•  Falcon 9 is primarily for delivering commercial space payload and therefore can carry a lot more weight, while New Shepard is really for taking space tourists to the edge of the earth and experience weightlessness.

About Falcon 9:

•  Falcon 9 is a 229.6 feet (70 metres) tall, two-stage rocket, built and designed by the company to deliver satellites and the Dragon spacecraft into orbit.
•  It’s got a diametre of 12 feet and generates more than 1.5 million pounds of thrust at sea level, going up to nearly 1.7 million pounds of thrust in vacuum of space.
•  Rocket has a higher performance than the prior version due to increased boost thrust, deep cryo-oxidizer and a much larger upper stage engine bell.

Two stages of Falcon 9:

FIRST STAGE: Falcon 9’s first stage incorporates nine Merlin engines and aluminum-lithium alloy tanks containing liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1) propellant. After ignition, a hold-before-release system ensures that all engines are verified for full-thrust performance before the rocket is released for flight. Then, with thrust greater than five 747s at full power, the Merlin engines launch the rocket to space. Unlike airplanes, a rocket's thrust actually increases with altitude; Falcon 9 generates more than 1.5 million pounds of thrust at sea level but gets up to nearly 1.7 million pounds of thrust in the vacuum of space.. The first stage engines are gradually throttled near the end of first-stage flight to limit launch vehicle acceleration as the rocket’s mass decreases with the burning of fuel.

SECOND STAGE: The second stage, powered by a single Merlin vacuum engine, delivers Falcon 9’s payload to the desired orbit. The second stage engine ignites a few seconds after stage separation, and can be restarted multiple times to place multiple payloads into different orbits. For maximum reliability, the second stage has redundant igniter systems. Like the first stage, the second stage is made from a high-strength aluminum-lithium alloy.

Dialing….mains(General Study III : Science and Technology)

Question:

SpaceX’s rocket landing triumph could make spaceflight cheaper. Discuss

By: Vishal