Falcon Heavy live coverage stream...

[luke strawwalker]

Nice live webcast of the Falcon Heavy launch...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws9C_UFvBGc

Ongoing coverage of past launches and landings while we wait...

Later! OL J R

[luke strawwalker]

Falcon heavy launched successfully... staged off the boosters successfully... both boosters boosted back and landed successfully at CCAFS, the core reentered successfully... no word yet if it landed successfully on the drone ship, second stage burn proceeding normally. Beautiful shots from the roadster after payload separation, with its "Starman" passenger (dummy wearing a SpaceX flight pressure suit for the manned Dragon. The Tesla roadster is in LEO.

"Outstanding test flight for Falcon Heavy" per SpaceX spokesman...

Later! OL J R

[luke strawwalker]

Another payload on board was the "ark", a specially built data storage device designed to survive for extremely long times in space... designed to preserve human knowledge by scattering it in space.

Later! OL J R

[luke strawwalker]

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING footage of BOTH Falcon heavy boosters landing successfully back at Cape Canaveral landing sight, simultaneously. Still no word on the core booster and its landing at sea on the drone ship "Of course I still love you". The feed cut off basically at about the time it should have touched down. Second stage inserted the Tesla and "Starman" and the other payloads aboard successfully into orbit-- awaiting word on the fate of the core booster and the re-ignition and insertion of the Tesla Roadster and Starman into heliocentric Mars transfer orbit...

Simply AMAZING what they can do... I hooped and hollered when the boosters landed back at the Cape... as close as I'll ever get to seeing the "first Moon landing" (since I wasn't born yet).

ABSOLUTE KUDOS to the entire SpaceX team... making NASA look like they're standing still since 2002... OL J R

[bernomatic]

ABSOLUTE KUDOS to the entire SpaceX team... making NASA look like they're standing still since 2002... OL J R

100% agree, and while they may not be up with the big boys yet, let's add Blue Origin into that mix, as I think the Bezos-Musk competition is a catalyst behind the rate we see these advances.

[bernomatic]

In the infancy of the space race, the Russians made great bounding leaps. Willey Ley espoused the belief that this was due to them mostly getting the technicians, instead of the scientists, from Peenemunde. The U.S. was launching smaller rockets, while gaining experience and developing something much larger than the USSR had at the time.

Sound familiar?

[luke strawwalker]

In the infancy of the space race, the Russians made great bounding leaps. Willey Ley espoused the belief that this was due to them mostly getting the technicians, instead of the scientists, from Peenemunde. The U.S. was launching smaller rockets, while gaining experience and developing something much larger than the USSR had at the time.

Sound familiar?

The Russians didn't rely on the German technology anywhere near as much as the US did. Oh, not that they didn't try... but the Soviets had already flown their own rocket-powered interceptor and they had Korolev and Glushko, who were every bit Von Braun and Oberth and Goddard's equals...

In his 4 volume "Rockets and People" history of the Soviet space program (and his own autobiography in one), Boris Chertok details his days working on the rocket interceptor project during the "Great Patriotic War" (as WWII was known in the Soviet Union). The Soviet's first flight of their rocket interceptor actually occurred before the Germans "Komet" Me-163 rocket fighter, IIRC... although they didn't put it into production. They experimented with rocket boosted propeller-powered fighters as well. But by the point those things were becoming available, the war had turned decidedly in the Soviet's favor, and the focus was on sheer massive production of what they already had proven available... their rocket industry focused on the famed "Katyusha" artillery rockets.

Immediately after the war, Boris Chertok, among many other future "luminaries" of the Soviet space program got "commissions" in the Soviet Army and were to dispatched to Germany to collect as much of their rocket technology as possible, and reconstruct it. The stories he told of the "Institute Rabe" he and a few others founded in Bleicherode, Germany as a central location to coordinate the efforts and collect all the equipment and data possible to reconstruct the V-2 hardware and systems are rather amazing... They had gotten their hands on some crashed V-2 stuff even before the fall of Germany, from a V-2 that crashed in Poland mostly. They arrived in Nordhausen shortly after the US had stripped everything they could possibly carry out of the facility. To their amazement, they were met by one of the slave laborers that took them to where they had hidden a fully intact gyroscope and guidance/control assembly of a V-2. It was a great help as everything they had up to that point was mostly parts and remains from crashed or destroyed V-2's. Having an intact system to test and examine was a Godsend. Many technicians and specialists were plenty happy to work for the Soviets, because at that point Germany was on a "cigarette and chocolate bar economy" and the opportunity to continue working on the systems they had been perfecting during the war was compelling. Soviet engine specialists profited from the taking of the test stands and various instrument factories-- and of course their test instruments and calibration equipment was far newer and more precise than the Soviets had, so most of that went back to the USSR. Chertok even crossed the lines and spoke with Von Braun, and basically tried to convince him to return with him to the Soviets, but he declined.

The Soviets DID end up 'relocating" a core group of "their Germans" to the Soviet Union, where they worked for a time very closely with the Russians at OKB-1, Korolev's design bureau. The Soviet government, fearful of having their best scientists working so closely with "fascists" and the possible spread of heretical ideas, soon isolated them on an island in a lake north of Moscow to continue their research. By this time the Soviets were launching captured V-2's and gaining experience, and were soon cloning their own version of the V-2, the Soviet R-1. Once they were proficient at launching R-1's, the Soviet government returned the Germans to East Germany. That ended the German contributions to the Soviet space program.

Their technical expertise and systems engineering approaches were of more value to the Soviets than anything-- it taught them how to organize the complex design, construction, testing, and operations of launching large rockets, and the lessons they learned about guidance, navigation, and control, testing, flight operations, etc. were the Germans' most valuable contribution. However, once the Soviets were "on par" with the German's technologically, the Germans made NO contributions to their program whatsoever and they were repatriated to Germany.

Korolev was the main power behind the Soviet program. He, along with his council of chief designers, pioneered most of the breakthroughs in the Soviet program. Their advances came fast and strong because, very early on the Soviet government (Stalin) threw his full support behind the missile effort, realizing that reaching nuclear parity with the United States in terms of bombers was a fool's errand. MRBM's, IRBM's, and then the ICBM allowed the Soviets to 'catch up' in strategic terms with the US, qualitatively if not quantitatively. The US was much more lackadaisical about diving in the "missile race", choosing instead to leverage the HUGE advantage we already had-- the fully matured and massive aircraft industry that had developed through the Second World War... with huge leaps in technology and capability (going from piston powered propeller-driven aircraft to supersonic jets) in only a handful of years, it was thought at that point there would be little point or purpose to long range ICBM's... Of course developments in smaller air defense missiles soon put that conclusion in doubt, which is why the US had, belatedly, put both Atlas and Titan into development and started spending money on Von Braun and his team...

Later! OL J R

[luke strawwalker]

Korolev's death in January of 1966 basically threw the entire Soviet space program into the ditch. The Soviets were already behind-- Soyuz wouldn't fly until months later, on Vladimir Kamarov's ill-fated Soyuz 1, and then would have a stand down for a couple years after that. The Soviets hadn't even made the decision to build N-1 and approved a lunar program until mid-64, by which point they were hopelessly behind the United States. The Soviets were also unwilling to expend the same level of effort on their N-1/L-3 program as the US did on Apollo/Saturn. After all, they were STILL playing catch-up with the US in terms of numbers and capabilities of their ICBM's (which they would continue to do so until they passed us in the early 70's and continued to build a huge arsenal of many different types of ICBM's) and their main focus was always on the "military first". Basically N-1 was just getting going good beyond the "paper rocket" stage when Korolev died on the operating table. Mishin was ill-equipped to step into his shoes, and anyway, at the same time, Korolev's old design bureau was handling at least a dozen major projects, from developing new ICBM's, solving the problems with Soyuz and getting it flying safely, participating in interplanetary missions to Mars, Venus, and the Moon, and many other things.

The Soviet's lack of sufficient testing was also the major clincher in their falling behind... they were unwilling to spend the money to build a test stand large enough to conduct a full=fledged test firing of the N-1's first stage. The falling out between Korolev and Glushko over kerosene vs. hypergolic engines, which led Korolev to the aircraft engine designer Kuznetsov, who had never developed a rocket engine before, and was now being tapped to design basically the 1960's kerosene powered equivalent of the SSME, was also problematical. The fact that the NK-33 engines he designed could only be fired ONCE (meaning they were junk after firing, and could not be test fired before their installation on the rocket) meant they were built in groups of six, of which one was test fired to "qualify" the entire batch, which was a poor way of doing it and caused huge problems. N-1's audacious new control system, the KORD, which instead of utilizing gimballing control engines as had been done on previous rockets, instead used "differential throttling" to control the vehicle in flight, was also "a step too far" at least at first, and caused the loss of the first test flight. Kuznetsov's engines and lack of testing was also to blame. One of their N-1's splashed back down right onto the pad and blew up, essentially destroying the pad and requiring a 2 year rebuild. Another N-1 started rotating around it's central axis (spinning) in flight to the point the engines were starved of propellant-- inhibits prevented the vehicle from shutting down prematurely and falling back onto the pad, so the rocket landed a couple miles away and exploded. Corrections took time. The last N-1 test saw the rocket make it to within seconds of staging, when one of the turbopumps on engine 4 exploded, causing the vehicle to go out of control and break up. By this point it was late 1971-- the US had landed on the Moon over 2 years before, the Moon Race was over. The Soviets had flown their first space station, Salyut 1, and had flown 2 flights up to it-- the first docked but were unable to enter because of a damaged docking mechanism on the Soyuz and were forced to return to Earth, and the second was the ill fated Soyuz 11 crew, who after their successful mission to Salyut 1, perished on reentry due to a faulty pressure equalization valve bleeding all their air into space immediately after retrofire and separation of the orbital and instrument aggregate compartments from the crew compartment (the separation of the "service module" in US terms).

The Soviets had decided to use the same "test it in flight" methods they had used successfully in testing their previous missiles and rockets, but this overlooked the ENORMOUS expense of each and every N-1 flight. It had been expensive on the previous missile and space developments-- notably on the R-7 (that launched Sputnik, and was modified for Vostok and Voskhod and again modified for Soyuz). But it was also originally a military missile, thus the expense could be "justified", unlike N-1 which basically had NO military applications, or very sketchy ones at best.

Then there was the fact that basically, the Soviet program suffered from "too much competition". Whereas the US had organized its space program around a centralized 'design and operations" organization (NASA) to which the contractors submitted proposals and NASA selected from, and then oversaw their design and construction of, and actively participated in the design and construction process as well, and then tested and operated those systems on behalf of the US government, in a VERY CENTRALIZED "command" type of program, the Soviets actually had a much more isolated and COMPETITIVE system... while Korolev's OKB-1 and Glushko's organization were the unchallenged front'-runners early in the era of spaceflight, by the early 60's other design bureaus like Yangel and Chelomei were drawing away resources and political favoritism for their own competing projects... there was no "central space agency" within the Soviet Union to oversee space projects-- indeed the space program in inextricably linked to the Soviet military, and overseen directly (via committees) by the Politburo and political leadership. By the time the Soviets decided to make developing a lunar program a priority in 64, their resources were divided and Chelomei was "the fair haired child" and getting more political traction than Korolev, though this changed once the dust settled after Khrushchev's ouster and replacement by Brezhnev... but by that time, Korolev had only months to live. Once Korolev was gone, the drive and brilliance that allowed the Soviets to go so far so quickly had slipped away, and the division of talent, resources, and duplication of programs and capabilities had already done irreparable damage to the Soviet effort.

It's a shame, because the next N-1 flight would in all likelihood have been successful. Kuznetsov had developed "reusable" engines for the N-1, meaning they could be individually test fired before installing on the rocket, and everything else had performed up to par, even the new flight computers and improved KORD control systems. BUT, the Soviets decided to pull the plug and sweep the whole thing under the rug...

Later! OL J R

[bernomatic]

Only a couple of glitches. From Space.com...

Only two events didn't go as planned: The center core of the three-booster first stage missed its drone-ship landing and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, and a final engine burn of the rocket's second stage was stronger than expected, sending the Falcon Heavy's unique payload (Musk's Tesla Roadster and a mannequin named "Starman") into an orbit that extends out to the asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars as initially planned.

https://www.space.com/39632-spacex-falc ... -next.html

Sure hope he bought flight insurance for the Roadster if it's going to the asteroid belt.

[luke strawwalker]

Jim-Bakker-Falcon-Heavy.jpg (115.62 KiB) Viewed 18245 times

LOL:) Later! OL J R