SpaceX claimed in a press release on Tuesday that it had successfully completed a soft splashdown of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket in its launch earlier this month.
Video below the fold. The quality is not great because of a buildup of ice on the camera, but it does show they were able to restart the engines twice after separation. It also shows the landing legs deploy just before the stage hovers above the water.
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The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has successfully launched six Orbcomm commercial satellites into orbit.
The six satellites still must be deployed. We will know if this is successful sometime in the next hour or so. Also, no news yet on SpaceX’s effort to recover the rocket’s first stage after a soft splashdown in the ocean.
Update: All 6 Orbcomm satellites have successfully deployed.
Update 2: From Elon Musk as to the first stage recovery: “Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom).”
The competition heats up: The Air Force today certified that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket had completed three successful flights.
This certification is a preliminary okay before the official certification. What it means is that the Air Force is agreeing that the Falcon 9 is capable of launching its satellites, which also means that the official certification is almost certain.
The next Falcon 9 launch of six commercial communication satellites remains on schedule this coming Monday, July 14, at 9:21 am (Eastern).
The Planetary Society announced today that its solar sail experiment, LightSail, will be launched in 2016 on a Falcon Heavy.
It will be a secondary payload on what might be one of Falcon Heavy’s early demo flights. They also say the launch date is scheduled for April 2016, but since the rocket has not yet been tested I wouldn’t take that date too seriously.
The competition heats up: The FAA today approved SpaceX’s application to establish a spaceport near Brownsville, Texas.
The competition heats up: The commercial satellite company Inmarsat has booked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for one firm launch and two additional options.
The firm contract is for the launch, scheduled perhaps aggressively for late 2016, of a satellite being built for both Inmarsat and Arabsat of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Arabsat will use the satellite for conventional telecommunications services for its wholly owned Hellas-Sat fleet operator of Greece. The Inmarsat payload uses S-band to provide mobile communications in Europe as part of a satellite-terrestrial broadband network, which is a new business line for Inmarsat.
Inmarsat’s launch contract is for a rocket that has not even yet been tested once, which tells us something about the faith they have in SpaceX. While I would be shocked if they didn’t have an option to pull out should there be significant delays or problems in launching Falcon Heavy, that they are willing to commit to it now is a convincing endorsement of SpaceX.
NASA has given SpaceX and Sierra Nevada six additional months, until March 2015, to complete their last contractual milestones for building their manned spacecraft.
An amendment signed by William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, on May 16 gives SpaceX until March 31, 2015, to complete the 14th and final milestone under its $440 million CCiCap agreement — a pad abort test of its Dragon capsule. The test originally was planned for April 2014.
On May 19, Gerstenmaier signed a similar amendment to Sierra Nevada’s $212.5 million CCiCap award to extend work associated with flight tests of the company’s Dream Chaser engineering test article until March 31, 2015.
NASA’s third Commercial Crew partner, Boeing, is on track to complete all its milestones, worth a combined $460 million, by the end of August,
The significance of this extension is that it reveals something about the dates for both SpaceX and Sierra Nevada’s next flight tests. The previously date for the pad abort test for Dragon had most recently been set for this summer. They are obviously not meeting that schedule and need more time. Sierra Nevada meanwhile wants to fly its Dream Chaser test vehicle some more, but apparently needs time to get it flight ready after it sustained damage during landing on its one and only flight test.
In addition, this extension suggests something about NASA’s assessment of the efforts of all three companies. The agency is supposed to down select to two companies by the end of the summer. The extension suggests that they are hoping to keep all three companies funded so that they all build their spacecraft.
The competition heats up: In an effort to compete with SpaceX, Arianespace has lowered the price it charges for launching smaller satellites on its Ariane 5 rocket.
According to Stephen Israel, the company’s CEO, the lower prices have already produced some contracts. However, the company has not been able to institute comparable cost savings in its operations, which means it
…will force the European launch supplier to ask European governments this year for a 16 percent increase in annual support payments. In its 2013 annual report, Evry, France-based Arianespace said it will ask European Space Agency governments in December to allocate 116 million euros ($158 million) per year for the period between 2015 and 2018 to enable Arianespace to reach financial break-even. That figure compares to the current allocation of about 100 million euros per year for 2013 and 2014 that ESA governments approved in late 2012.
I wonder if the company will get these additional subsidies. In the past there were complaints from the European partners about the inability of Arianespace to make a profit. For it to lose even more money now will not make people happy.
I think, however, that Israel recognizes this. He has been pushing the organization to streamline its operation. Whether he can succeed against Arianespace’s entrenched pork-laden structure remains the big question.
A new water supplier has stepped forward to help fill SpaceX’s gigantic water needs at its proposed Texas spaceport.
An earlier news story had noted the insufficient water capacity in Brownsville compared to the amount of water SpaceX would need for its rocket launches. This new report illustrates how competition and the potential for profits always seems to solve these kinds of problems.
SpaceX has delayed its Falcon 9 Orbcomm launch until July.
“SpaceX is taking a closer look at a potential issue identified while conducting pre-flight checkouts during (Sunday’s) countdown,” the company said in statement posted on its website on Monday. “SpaceX will stand down Tuesday while our engineering teams evaluate further,” it said.
Taking into account a previously scheduled maintenance period for the Eastern Test Range, which supports launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the earliest SpaceX expects to be able to fly is the first week of July.
The willingness of SpaceX to address technical issues rather than push for launch continues to recommend them to me, especially as the company also has a record of producing what it promises within a remarkably fast schedule.
SpaceX now says that Tuesday will be the earliest it will try again to launch six Orbcomm satellites on its Falcon 9 rocket.
There were attempts to launch both on Saturday and Sunday, with weather scrubbing the first and an unspecified technical problem scrubbing the second.
