SpaceX Launch - 5:54:39 PM UTC

Launching a fuckton of iridium-NEXT sats.

Press Kit
spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_iridium1_press_kit.pdf

Technical Stream youtube.com/watch?v=7WimRhydggo

Normie meme-stream youtube.com/watch?v=tTmbSur4fcs

Come oooon, let everything work perfectly.

up we go again

Can't wait for the landing. Last time the engineers had multiple orgasms when the thingy landed on the drone ship.

bump

T-5mins lads

Approximate activity schedule

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in the press kit, they say "1st Stage Landing" under the mission timeline. It's the first time that it doesn't say "experimental" landing in the press kit. They must be really confident now....

Noice.
Tuning in.

>space botnets

>inb4 it blows the drone ship up and billions of dolars go down the drain
>mfw

Oh man that close up of the engines. I can't wait for falcon heavy

oh boy, it's gotta be another fireworks

HERE WE GO

TEN SECONDS

GOOD LIFTOFF

MAX Q IN ~1 MINUTE

good camera work

so bright

Is there a stream with onboard cams again?

when is it going to explode

nvm, there it is.

>dat heat on the exhaust
how can noctuas even compete?

in about three minutes

EARTH IS FLAT LIKE KANSAS

Landing at ~T+ 7min 40sec

WAFFLES

le tiny space feet

holy shit here we go. that shit is falling FAST

...

HELL YEAH SCIENCE BITCH

can't wait

Success.

I SEE THE BOAT

LOOKS GOOOD

BULLSEYE!

NO CRASH

"falcon landed"

flawless victory!

HOLY SHIT THEY DID IT AGAIN

beautiful

Beatiful

Mars trip when

Guys...

GUYS...

What if...

What if we made a rocket...

What if we made a rocket and...

What if we made a rocket and landed it...

So we could re-use it...

Instead of just letting it become trash in space....

>tfw no drone ship gf to land on

>stream starts stuttering and distorting the second the rocket is entering the cam
>lags for a sec and the rocket just stands there
and you people think this is legit

So I told SpaceX to reuse first stage.. they actually did it the absolute madmen hahahahahahaha!

Less than 10 years according to the Golden God Dr. Elon Musk-sama himself

nice

that will never work

As an onlooker I still find it baffling that they can calculate every small movement beforehand.

Amazing how the entire first stage launch and landing in happens in less than 10 minutes.

Holy shit go back to Sup Forums, are you clinically retarded?

...

Fuck yeah they made it

hi elon

Hi. How is it being poor?

it's the darn atmosphere/rocket equation. Space really isn't that far away - it takes an awful amount of energy though.

that was even low for /x/-tier conspiraposting.

wew

...

Some people are just idiots. Leave him and let him die dumb.

We should rather be glad that everything went great so far.

fuck i missed it. They landed..... yay : D....

xD ^___^ =333333

They had a few bloopers. The mic of the female host didnt work at the beginning, but the launch was perfect.

do we know if this is a re-utilized stage?
is the stage going to be used in future missions or we are still in the testing phase?

there probably would've been more news if it was a reused rocket

Testing for sure. No contract SpaceX gets is gonna allow them to use that stage.

This is literally state of the art.

-nope

-yes, hopefully. SpaceX has a bunch of returned stages to do testing on. First reuse should be this year

>The mic of the female host didnt work at the beginning
Dumping all my SpaceX stock now so...

photo didn't load for some reason

so r@ndum >xDDD

They also changed something about the helium tanks which caused the last explosion. So its probably a new rocket. Also, it would be really bad if something happened with this launch. So why take the risk of using a reutilized stage?

>No contract SpaceX gets is gonna allow them to use that stage.
since when? They already have a client who wants to be the first to fly on a reused stage. They'll be flying one this year almost certainly.

It was a new stage.

They should do a launch with a re-used stage sometime this year. They have customers willing to fly on a reuse stage, and it's great publicity for any satellite launched on one.

once we start reflying stages the bathtub curve really comes into effect.

In fact, new stages will probably less more to the clients than reused stages, as they have not been "proven"

then old stages will be really cheap, for student cube stats or the like

Oh well then I guess I'm wrong. What I really meant is that misson critical stuff won't use a reused stage. Too, uh, critical.

Hmmm, sounds like the rocket is dumping leftover LOX. Cant see anything though because SpessX is livestreaming the rocket on its orbital path.

for the near future, yes

but once stuff gets reused a lot
would you want your billion-$ sat to launch on a stage that has never been flown, or a stage that has been flown successfully 12 times?

the bathtub curve is important, but people dont really know about it

how good would it be in terms of risks, using a reused stage considering the materials and structure has been stressed out to the max already?

whats that to the right?

>What I really meant is that mission critical stuff won't use a reused stage.
Why not? Surely it would be more preferable to reuse mission critical stuff.

If you were flying from the US to Europe, would you prefer to do so on a 747 that had just been built and never flown anywhere before, or on one that had safely completed thousands of transatlantic flights already?

In the future, the safest rockets will almost certainly be ones that have completed many missions already.

ah I had the quotes switched around

What do you mean? There's just 4 first stages.

NASA ON SUICIDE WATCH

Halfway to deployment

what's the attrition rate for pups?

It always dumps an excess fuel after landing. Makes it more bottom heavy which means less prone to tipping, plus eliminates the chance of a kaboom for any reason.

planes can fly thousands of times, because they are designed to withstand their particular environment - wind, rain, birds hitting them, etc

SpaceX, after analyzing landed stages, is figuring out how to make rockets survive launches more than once - in a way, figuring out how to design them with the same goal as planes - you don't throw it away every time.

It's an iterative process. basically they will keep launching stages, see what's broken, and then replace it with something that can launch a few more launch cycles than the original.

Even without any data from landed stages, spacex said that their 1st recovered stage "could have" been refueled and launched the next day. So it probably won't be long until stuff gets reflown quite often

There is a graphics glitch on the pole.... Must be a stressy day for spacex

texture wrapping is difficult AF. you try and put a rectangular texture on a sphere, and weird shit happens unless you use the proper algorithm.

Usually at the "poles" of a object the texture freaks out. It makes sense then that the earth's poles are the location of the weirdness.

t. took a bunch of 3d graphic design classes

Actually no, the first stage was tested and at vandy before the Amos mishap, it was taken back to Hawthorne for some retrofitting of which we don't know the details but it's still the same old falcon 9 stage one

But didnt the guy at the beginning say that they modified it so it could hold helium at higher temperatures?

meaning it's a new rocket off of the assembly line, and they made some changes to it.

right now they are on block 4 F9. block 5, the final block according to SpaceX, is coming soon

They modified the loading procedure from what is understood, any future stages like the ones for echostar, CRS 10, ses-10 is reuse and then whatever is beyond do have slightly modified copv's but that's it

block means "version"?

What happens after block 5? They just stop developing it and keep using the same one?

Block 5 is when the design is meant to reach maturity for a while and also when falcon 9 cores become interchangable with falcon heavy side cores, of which the current ones aren't, however for the falcon heavy demo flight they are modifying at least one of the returned stages to be a side core

SEPERATION SOON

When's the explosion

>people think the landing is real

all hollywood cgi

So, when the whole network is online and all 70 sats are up, will you be able to see them every night? They sadly dont make flares, right?

They do not as astronmers hate the iridium flares and have been very vocal about it, however the flares from the old sats will still be around for another 2 or more years depending on how long deorbiting them takes

next launch is at January 26, 2017

yeah, they unfortunately do not make flares. Sat watching is a cool hobby though - with the proper equipment you can snap some neat pics

we've deduced what some spy sats are doing though amateur photography