It's up

We did it lads!

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not sure if i want it to succeed or blow up

Guessing we are looking at
a) hold down test-firing
or
b) the fucking is gonna do a surprise launch just for the fuck of it

*fucker

i-is it actually gonna happen?

nah it too fat
Will implode mid takeoff.

I don't follow these pop-sci stuff, but can someone give a quick rundown?

its the falcon heavy rocket getting ready to launch musk's car to mars

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Welp, I think this makes the Atlas 5 and SLS about obsolete.

>ywn create your own revelating successful car company
>ywn create a successful space travel company and send your own car made by your company to space

They'll be fine

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A bubblegum with Musk DNA and a drawing by his doughter inside glove compartment?

What will he surprise us with?

the air force will keep atlas on life support until another launch provider can take its place. they want two providers to be available at all times, so spacex and ULA for now and maybe spacex / blue origin in the future.

interesting how reusing 4 SSMEs doesn't put a dent in the cost

reusing SSME's prolly cost more than producing some nice new open cycle gas generator engine like the merlin's...

NASA doesn't WANT to launch or do anything, thats why they move at glacial pace. Look at how delayed the commercial crew shitfest is, all because of NASA

come three musk

>actually thinking SpaceX can't build a PAF capable of handling Falcon Heavy's maximum payload mass
>being this retarded

come four musk

>rocket implodes during takeoff

that'd be a first
though SpaceX did accidentally have a Falcon 1 implode a little during transport once

come five musk

>reusing

They had to pretty much rebuild those RS-25s for them to be good to launch SLS, and they won't be reused afterwards.

>He thinks the structure of the 2nd stage is magically overdesigned to handle 50 ton payloads

They would have to redesign the WHOLE 2nd stage, something not at all on their schedule to do

This is gay. very gay

When is the lunch? anybody has the stream link?

>something not at all on their schedule to do

Falcon 9 Block 5 is almost done, and soon after that Falcon Heavy (with block 5 cores) will be done too. Once that's complete they can throw a little more R&D effort into adjusting the 2nd stage before switching the majority of engineers onto BFR. The Falcon rocket first stages are going to have their designs frozen at Block 5.

Besides that, who says the 2nd stage CAN'T already handle a *64* ton payload? The first stage has no problem holding up the second stage plus its own weight, and it's all the same thickness of sheet metal. The PAF actually needs to be redesigned because it doesn't rely on internal pressure to keep its shape.

Ok Veeky Forums, realistically, how much will our energy be reliant on extra-planetary resources within 50 resources if this is a success? Will it be commercially feasible?

>actually thinking SpaceX can't build a 2nd stage capable of handling Falcon Heavy's maximum payload mass
>being this retarded

This is just a fit test, static fires aren't happening for a while and the launch isn't happening until a while after the static fires.

Our energy? Hopefully none percent, in 50 years we should be using high performance fission breeder reactors. Falcon Heavy isn't the rocket to revolutionize space travel to the point that we can start mining stuff for here on Earth, it's just the rocket that lets SpaceX launch every commercial payload to every Earth orbit without needing to expend first stages anymore.

ow fuck. I got my popcorn for nothing

>Besides that, who says the 2nd stage CAN'T already handle a *64* ton payload?
Because you don't produce the most efficient rocket on the planet by OVER BUILDING it

It can handle what they say it can handle
10 tons, with a significant safety margin

>The first stage has no problem holding up the second stage plus its own weight
Something that is designed to hold 100 tons up there, with appropriate margins, is not magically also strong enough to hold 160 tons. It's the internal lattice that also adds strength/rigidity.

Now, is the F9 Block V designed around being capable of supporting the 20-30 ton payloads that the Falcon Heavy might be physically capable of launching? Perhaps
But probably not.

not that they can't, but that they WON'T
I guarrentee it

>Because you don't produce the most efficient rocket on the planet by OVER BUILDING it

Except they did exactly that already, duh. The Falcon 9 is structurally stronger than any rocket in production today, simply because it has to deal with all the forces of reentry and landing, along with the actual launch.

All that aside, even if the current Falcon 9/Heavy 2nd stage and cores are not capable of supporting a payload weighing what the rocket could physically put into orbit, there's absolutely no reason that they couldn't design them to be able to do so. Yes they would be overbuilt for light payloads. They already ARE overbuilt for light payloads, just like literally every launch vehicle is. Tweaking the rocket so it is strong enough to launch a 64 ton payload won't magically make it unable to launch a lighter payload either. Granted that may require a performance upgrade to keep the same payload if the structural mass increases, but the block 5 is already getting yet another improved Merlin 1D, which could be to offset those structural changes if they have already been made.

>Tweaking the rocket so it is strong enough to launch a 64 ton payload won't magically make it unable to launch a lighter payload either
It WOULD take weight off the already small payload it can take to GTO. Which is their primary business, and their current weak point.

>Because you don't produce the most efficient rocket on the planet by OVER BUILDING it

There's no point in optimizing your rocket to payload mass unless you assume that all launch vehicle costs tie directly to the amount of worked material that goes into it. Reusable rockets make optimizing your rocket to be as small as possible for the payload irrelevant.

You don't get to space without heavily optimizing for payload mass
They accept the losses that reuse imposes, but they still are pushing their limits to put send properly sized sats to GTO

They have clearly spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading their rocket for superior payload
Everything they are doing with the BFR is about increasing payload, methane engines, higher thrust to weight, carbon composite structure, etc

I'm not talking about the problem of making big rockets. The established rocket industry is all about making the rocket *just big enough* for the payload; that's why Atlas V does all its shenanigans with variable numbers of strap on boosters.

They are reserving that one for the first manned BFR mission.

>It WOULD take weight off the already small payload it can take to GTO. Which is their primary business, and their current weak point.

Which is what Falcon Heavy is used for. No more expendable Falcon 9 launches with normal payloads anymore. Either it's light enough to go on a reusable F9, or it goes on Heavy.

Above a certain mass the center core of Heavy must be expended, but the boosters remain recoverable up until near the maximum possible payload to LEO. Only payloads massing very close to the 64 ton absolute limit would require a fully expendable Heavy launch, luckily the only customers launching such a heavy payload would also be willing to pay for it, since a fully expendable FH is still far cheaper than a Delta IV Heavy launch.

>Everything they are doing with the BFR is about increasing payload

>methane engines

Not about increasing payload, but about increasing reusability (no soot) and enabling ISRU propellant production in space.

This emphasis on payload mass optimization is old space thinking. You still have to keep it in mind, but when there is a tradeoff beween reliability and payload mass/payload fraction, you go for the first one. That is new space thinking. Now it is the booster itself is the important thing, not stuffing it with precious payload to the maximum extent possible.

Falcon Heavy is merely a stopgap until BFR. They could upgrade it to handle 64 tons if they wanted to, but there is no point in doing that when BFR should be flying in a several years and launch much bigger payloads anyway. It would be a pointless detour from their initial goal. In fact even Falcon Heavy itself is a questionable rocket especially since it took a lot more time and money than originally intended. In hindsight Musk would probably not choose to go for a Heavy variant and instead concentrate on BFR.

The biggest danger for the Falcon Heavy is that it'll blow up, destroying a launch site, and grounding them for another 6 months

They choose this size because anything bigger would cause the cost to bloom because it wouldn't fit in their rocket facilities.

Heavy took longer than expected but most of the delay has been caused by the continual evolution of Falcon 9. Even once F9 got to the point that designing a Heavy version made sense, so many resources were being used to develop stage recovery that it slowed FH development significantly.

We already know that Elon doesn't want to ever do a three core design again. Not only is it more trouble than it's worth, having three cores vastly increases the turnaround time for the vehicle compared to the potential with a single core design, which could land directly in the launch mount and be reconnected for re-stacking and refueling immediately.

Something SpaceX probably wants to avoid is to have to revisit Falcon development in order to beef up the stages and PAF to increase the structural load limit for the Falcon family after they've already diverted the vast majority of their resources to BFR. Their plan to finance BFR right now is to build ahead with Falcon 9 and Heavy, get a good stockpile of cores, and then use those cores to perform all Falcon missions, shutting or very significantly slowing down Falcon production and diverting that funding over to BFR development and production.

In order to really be able to drop Falcon production, the limits imposed by the structure on the payload mass should be raised to at least the maximum payload a Falcon Heavy can put into orbit in reusable mode. The chance is small, but real, that with Falcon Heavy launch prices people will make payloads to take advantage of the extra mass and lower cost. With a more robust structure, SpaceX can accept those launch contracts. Even if the reinforcements reduced the performance of both rockets very significantly, which it probably wouldn't, that still isn't a problem because the payloads that are suddenly just a bit too massive to fly on a reusable Falcon 9 are still well below the upper limit for a reusable Falcon Heavy, and would therefore get bumped up to Heavy.

i.4cdn.org/sci/1514436832500.webm

When is this garbage supposed to launch?

Next year

>Next year
A fucking year?
Why did they placed it there then?

user, it's 29th of December...

You do realize that by next year he means january, right?

God I wish this was real

Whoa didn't think about that.

Yep we all share oxygen with this thing....

No bully I am depressed it takes me effort to figure out in what part of the year I am.

The payload mass is a nearly insignificant part of the load the upper stage needs to bear. The vast majority of the load is aerodynamic resistance from pushing a blunt 5-meter-diameter fairing through the atmosphere at supersonic speed. In addition, it has to carry the propellant, particularly the liquid oxygen in the upper part, which is much higher mass than any payload could be.

Furthermore, the upper stage is constructed according to the same methods as the F9 lower stage, which is longer and has to carry a larger propellant load plus the entire upper stage plus the fairing drag plus payload. The upper stage alone is over 100 tonnes. The idea that the F9 booster can carry a 120 tonne payload, but a shorter section of the same pressurized pipe will crumple under more than 10 tonnes is incredibly stupid to even suggest, let alone claim is an established fact.

This claim that Falcon Heavy payloads would be limited by the structural strength of the upper stage is based on nothing but laughable ignorance.

I thought FH was mainly to take the largest NRO satellite contracts away from ULA. Only Delta Heavy can launch them at the moment.

I don't think anyone else has a payload larger than NRO's spysats.

FH is also great for big bigelow modules and moon payloads

That's a part of it. However, the extra money they'd get from having a few more launches is much less than the money they'd save by not having to expend (and thus continuously produce) Falcon cores for launches that are just a little bit too heavy for stage recovery to be an option with Falcon 9.

Maybe someone will build a payload with Falcon Heavy in mind that'd outweigh what we currently send up. It seems more likely that before such a payload was selected, developed, and built, SpaceX would be very well on their way to developing and building BFR, and Falcon 9 and Heavy would already have one foot out the door.

it's down

spaceflightnow.com/2017/12/29/time-lapse-video-falcon-heavy-lowered-after-launch-pad-debut/

Will Musk ever recover?

>They have clearly spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading their rocket for superior payload
...with increased engine thrust from engines of the same mass, not by cutting more and more structural mass.

Falcon 9's structural mass advantages come from superior materials and methods, due to taking advantage of the latest advances and just plain good engineering, not low structural margins. They have higher structural margins than older rockets.

Why continue with the re-usability nonsense? A rocket that wastes fuel to haul itself back is one that could have sent a larger payload in space had it been designed properly.

>fuel is even 1% of the cost of a rocket launch

what universe do you live in

>Why continue with the re-usability nonsense?

why throw away tens of millions in flight hardware

>wastes fuel
Building a new rocket every time is not wasteful?

That's good, it means that everything went to plan. This was just a 'fit test' to see if the launch pad could support the heavy, the static fire is apparently occurring around New Year's and the actual launch should be soon after.

>t. Stéphane

I don't think it's good or bad. They'd take it down if they found a problem that needed fixing, too. Things would have to go really spectacularly wrong for them to be unable to take it down.

If they found a structural problem it would likely be taken down immediately to avoid damage, and if there was an electronic fault it would likely be left up for multiple days until they fixed said fault; but since they left it up for about a day I think it's accurate to assume that everything went to plan.

Okay retard, let me ask you this:
How cheap would plane tickets be if we dropped the "reusable airplane" meme and just crashed them into the ground? The fuel you waste on landing break could be used to carry more passagers!

congrats on triggering everyone with this shitpost user

200 years from now, one of the Mars missions will have a serious, life-threatening problem. The solution to this problem that will save 1000s of people will involve a small course correct in order to "dock" with the nearly forgotten Tesla Roadster, in order to harvest parts from it to fix their ship. Books, Movies, and Experiencings will be made of it and it will be a hit for the summer.

>re-usability nonsense
Nigger, LOX/kerosene is fucking free compared to the rocket booster.

>re-usability nonsense?

Oh right, they must be dirty hippies.

>downvotes

What a faggot he is

No rocket ever launches with anything close to its maximum payload anyway. Falcon 9 can handle up to 22.8 tons to low Earth orbit, but to date the heaviest payload it has launched was only 13.4 tons. Most payloads are less than 5 tons. Clearly being able to reuse a Falcon 9 and indeed any rocket makes sense because the performance hit being taken because of reusability isn't even felt on most payloads anyway.

Side note, all those people who said Falcon 9 is limited to ~10 tons of payload due to the PAF/2nd stage not being able to structurally hold up to a heavier payload have clearly been BTFO but they didn't even know it.

Literally r*ddit the person.

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>No rocket ever launches with anything close to its maximum payload anyway
That's not true. Mature rockets commonly use their full capacity, and SpaceX often pushes the limits of what Falcon 9 can do while still recovering the rocket.

>Falcon 9 can handle up to 22.8 tons to low Earth orbit, but to date the heaviest payload it has launched was only 13.4 tons. Most payloads are less than 5 tons.
Falcon 9's a special case both because of its reusability and because of its evolution to a much higher performance vehicle after a huge number of advance launch orders due to low prices. Most of its launch contracts were signed. SpaceX both charges more (specially negotiated rates, not advertised ones) and gives lower schedule priority (in its very full manifest) for launching heavy payloads.

And of course, you can't compare beyond-LEO launches to maximum LEO payloads.

>SpaceX often pushes the limits of what Falcon 9 can do while still recovering the rocket.

But never gets close to the actual expendable limit, which is what the other guy was saying reusability prevents SpaceX from doing and that therefore reusability is a bad thing. Without reusability, Falcon 9 would be a rocket launching most often with less than 1/4 of its maximum payload.

>Mature rockets commonly use their full capacity

Only because they tend to have more modular designs, of course an Atlas V 401 will carry a payload closer to its maximum than a Falcon 9, that's because the Atlas doesn't have any solids to increase its payload capacity. If Atlas and Delta weren't modular and instead had to be able to lift their maximum payload with their base (and only) configuration, then they'd be in the same overpowered boat as F9 when it came to you can't compare beyond-LEO launches to maximum LEO payloads

Right, but to follow that other user's logic we'd be stuffing every rocket to the gills with payload and dropping it all off in LEO every time, with the payload having to fend for itself from there, because it "would save more money per kilogram". My only point here is that filling up a rocket with its maximum payload to whatever orbit rarely happens except in the case that the rocket itself can be configured to have a maximum payload in that mass range. Deleting the Falcon 9 reuse capability in favor of eking out more performance doesn't make sense since Falcon 9 can already launch most payloads in reusable mode anyway, and with Falcon Heavy even most of the heavier payloads going to high orbits can be launched in reusable mode. If reusability isn't hurting your real world market competitive ability, then it really doesn't matter how much the payload mass ceiling dropped as a result of not wanting to expend rockets.

Dont forget to hide and sage elon meme shill threads

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Will it star Matt Damon or Tom Hanks?

No, more like i entered this shitpost to remind others that autistic elon meme shills are not welcome here, you dumb nigger

As far as treads go, this one has been surprisingly civil. Same with the "we went to the moon"-thread. I suspect the 4-5 threads discussing ol'Trumpy's latest twitter-episode has drawn in most of the shitposters. Ofc, a few will leak through, but some always do

Show us on the doll where the Tesla salesman touched you, user. This is a safe space for you

>as if id ever even consider buying that smoking heap of shit Elol Meme calls a car
go fuck yourself, dumb nigger. You too, Elol Meme