SpaceX to test landing legs on next Falcon rocket

[Buster's Uncle]

SpaceX to test landing legs on next Falcon rocket
Reuters
By Irene Klotz  20 hours ago



CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Feb 24 - Privately owned Space Exploration Technologies plans to include landing legs on its next Falcon 9 rocket, a key step toward developing a reusable, lower-cost launcher, company officials said on Monday.

Ultimately, the firm, which is owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, would like to fly its rockets back to the launch site where they would land and be reused.

For now, the first stage of the rocket, which is discarded a few minutes after liftoff, falls back into the ocean with so much force it is destroyed.

SpaceX, as the company is known, tried in September 2013 to cushion a rocket's fall by restarting its engines during the descent. The test was nearly successful, but the rocket's spinning choked off the flow of fuel and it smashed into the water.

For its next test, targeted for March 16, SpaceX will again attempt the engine restarts and deploy four landing legs to provide the Falcon 9 with more stability. SpaceX spokeswoman Emily Shanklin puts the odds of success at less than 40 percent.

The legs will be attached to the base of the rocket and stowed during flight. They are designed to deploy as the rocket descends back toward the ocean.

"Given all the things that would have to go right, the probability of recovering the first stage is low," Shanklin wrote in an email. "It probably won't work, but we are getting closer."

SpaceX has a parallel program to test precision landing techniques. The company in October completed tests on an experimental vehicle known as Grasshopper which successfully touched down on its launch pad after reaching an altitude of 0.46 miles (740 meters).

The program has since relocated from SpaceX's McGregor, Texas, test site to New Mexico's Spaceport America near Las Cruces for higher-altitude flights.

SpaceX last year entered the commercial satellite launch market with a price that already sharply undercuts its competitors and so far a perfect track record. The company also flies cargo the International Space Station for NASA and is working on a capsule to fly astronauts as well.

The March 16 launch, which will be from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, will be the third of 12 station resupply missions under SpaceX's $1.6 billion contract with NASA.

SpaceX also flies from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and has a preliminary agreement with NASA to take over one of the mothballed space shuttle launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A fourth launch site in a commercial spaceport has not yet been selected, although Brownsville, Texas, is considered the front-runner.


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[Buster's Uncle]

SpaceX Adds Landing Legs to Falcon 9 Rocket for Next Launch, Elon Musk Says (Photo)
SPACE.com
By Mike Wall, Senior Writer  5 hours ago



A look at the landing legs SpaceX is mounting on its Falcon 9 rocket for the company's next cargo mission to the International Space Station, which is slated to launch on March 16, 2014.



The private spaceflight company SpaceX is strapping landing gear onto the rocket that will launch the company's unmanned Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station next month.

Putting landing legs on the Falcon 9 rocket, which is slated to blast off on March 16, marks another step in SpaceX's quest to develop a fully reusable launch system. But current plans don't call for the Falcon 9 to actually touch down on the legs after next month's liftoff, said SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

"Mounting landing legs (~60 ft span) to Falcon 9 for next month's Space Station servicing flight," Musk said Sunday (Feb. 23) via Twitter, where he posted a photo of the rocket. "However, F9 will continue to land in the ocean until we prove precision control from hypersonic thru subsonic regimes."

SpaceX holds a $1.6 billion contract to make 12 robotic supply runs to the space station for NASA using Dragon and the Falcon 9. The company has already completed two of these flights successfully; the March 16 flight will initiate contracted mission number three.

But the company's ambitions extend far beyond low-Earth orbit. Musk has said that he established SpaceX primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species, and he hopes the company plays a prominent role in getting a Mars colony up and running.

One key to making such big dreams a reality is developing a fully and rapidly reusable launch system, which Musk has said could lower the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100. Toward that end, SpaceX has been testing a reusable rocket prototype called Grasshopper, which has a made a series of higher and more complicated flights over the past year and a half.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX has also involved the Falcon 9 in its reusability research and development. For example, engineers managed to re-light the first stage of a new and improved version of the rocket known as the Falcon 9 v1.1 twice during the vehicle's maiden flight last September.

While SpaceX officials celebrated the re-lights as a major milestone, the Falcon 9 did not end up making a soft touchdown in the ocean after successfully delivering its payloads (Canada's CASSIOPE space-weather satellite and three smaller spacecraft) to orbit that day — perhaps because the rocket was not outfitted with landing legs.

"This particular stage was not equipped with landing gear, which could have helped stabilize the stage like fins would on an aircraft," SpaceX officials wrote in an update two weeks after the Sept. 29 flight. "The stage ended up spinning to a degree that was greater than we could control with the gas thrusters on board, and ultimately we hit the water relatively hard."


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