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According to Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance, the next Falcon 9 launch scheduled for May will also try for a water recovery.
The next step, assuming sea crews are unable to recover the rocket from Friday's launch, is to return a first stage to a precision touchdown on land and determine what might be necessary to prepare it for another flight.
Musk hopes SpaceX can recover a Falcon 9 booster this year and fly a used first stage for the first time in 2015.
SpaceX plans to clad the rocket's single-engine upper stage with a heat shield with an eye toward reusing it as well. The company has not disclosed a timetable for a potential recovery of the second stage.
"We don't have to just recover it," Musk said. "We have to show that it can be reflown quickly and easily, where the only thing you [have to do] is reload propellant."
Here are the estimated costs for one use and partially reusable and more reusable Spacex rockets.
One use Falcon 9 rocket launch cost $1,862/lb
One use Falcon Heavy launch cost $1000/lb
The above costs are from Wikipedia and the Spacex website.
First stage reusable Falcon 9 launch cost $1200/lb
First stage reusable Falcon Heavy launch cost $600/lb
The cost of fuel and the Spacex rockets has been repeated a few times.
Musk reiterated the origin of the SpaceX production model, saying fuel is only 0.3 percent of the total cost of a rocket, with construction materials accounting for no more than 2 percent of the total cost, which for the Falcon 9 is about $60 million.
Musk said that a rocket's first stage accounts for three-quarters of its total price tag, so a vehicle with a reusable first stage can be produced at far less cost — assuming the hardware is fully and rapidly reusable.
A reusable rocket stage would be able to launch about 80% of the cargo of a one use rocket. The weight of fuel is needed to fly the stage back and the extra weight of landing legs and other modifications for reuse have to be carried.
Two launches with second reusing the first stage.
Capital cost - 1.25 times the cost of one full rocket.
0.6% for fuel
Launch cargo 1.6 times the cargo of one rocket.
78% of the cost of a single use rocket
Three launches with reuse of the first stage twice.
Capital cost - 1.5 times the cost of one rocket
0.9% for fuel
Launch cargo 2.4 times the cargo of one rocket
62.5% of the cost of a single use rocket
50% of the cost with five launches and four reuses of the first stage [$930 per pound for the 9 v1.1 and $500 per pound for the heavy]
Reusable first stage falcon heavy [with about twenty reuses] can get down to about $350/lb [one third the one use price].
Reusable (about fifteen times) Falcon 9 rocket launch cost all stages reusable $100/lb [all three stages of a falcon heavy, should get to about ten times cheaper]
The New Mexico Exoplanet Spectroscopic Survey Instrument (NESSI) will soon get its first "taste" of exoplanets, helping astronomers decipher their chemical composition. Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars beyond our sun.
NESSI got its first peek at the sky on April 3, 2014. It looked at Pollux, a star in the Gemini constellation, and Arcturus, in the Boötes constellation, confirming that all modes of the instrument are working.
"After five years of development, it's really exciting to turn on our instrument and see its first light," said Michele Creech-Eakman, the principal investigator of the project at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, N.M. "Planet hunters have found thousands of exoplanets, but what do we know about them? NESSI will help us find out more about their atmospheres and compositions."
Elon Musk, a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, confirmed on Friday that his company SpaceX successfully executed a soft landing of its Falcon 9 rocket's first stage in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Falcon 9 rocket was used last week to launch the Dragon resupply spacecraft to the International Space Station. The launch was exciting because it was the first time the rocket's first stage, or bottom part of the rocket that is ignited at launch, was equipped with four "landing legs."
where's the capacity to deflect or capture these rocks as needed?Asteroid passing Earth will be closer than moon
Asteroid passing Earth will be closer than moon
An asteroid is headed this way. But even though it will come closer than the moon, astronomers say it will pose no danger.
Observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope have, for the first time, determined the rotation rate of an exoplanet. Beta Pictoris b has been found to have a day that lasts eight hours. This is quicker than any planet in the Solar System. This result extends the relation between mass and rotation seen in the Solar System to exoplanets. Similar techniques will allow mapping exoplanets in detail with the European Extremely Large Telescope.
The 8.2m diameter Unit Telescopes can also be used individually. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 can be obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion (four thousand million) times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.
The instruments currently available at VLTI can combine a maximum of three Unit Telescopes or three Auxiliary Telescopes at the same time. The Auxiliary Telescopes have 100% of their observing time with the VLTI, while the Unit Telescopes are usually busy with an enormous variety of observations, so they typically do not spend more than 20% of their time on VLTI. The Unit Telescopes are typically used in interferometric mode for fainter sources, when a larger collecting area is needed.
SpaceX, the rocket and space exploration company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, filed a protest against the U.S. Air Force this week, saying that the military has unfairly prevented it from competing for space satellite launches.
The following day, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, who is targeted by U.S. sanctions over Ukraine, suggested that America may need to find a large trampoline to continue NASA’s access to the International Space Station. Since the space shuttle’s retirement, the U.S. pays Russia about $71 million per seat to fly U.S. astronauts to the station. The current ISS mission, Expedition 39 (pdf), has two Americans among the six-person crew.
By Dan Malerbo, Buhl Planetarium and Observatory
The Cassini spacecraft's tour of Saturn has been one of NASA's most successful planetary missions. The spacecraft's amazing discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of the ring world and its moons. The spacecraft has recently uncovered evidence that Saturn's moon, Enceladus, harbors a large underground ocean.
I finally got to see one.
SpaceX's F9R Dev — the modified Falcon 9 first stage that's a bigger sibling to SpaceX's Grasshopper testbed rocket — flew a second time Thursday at the company's McGregor development facility, two weeks after its first free flight.
The test is another step in SpaceX's drive to produce a recoverable and reusable first stage, which saw another leap forward with the successful splashdown of the actual Falcon 9 first stage after it launched the Dragon cargo ship toward the International Space Station.
I can't get much more specific because SpaceX hasn't talked about the test yet (that usually happens after a day or two). As near as I could tell it flew to the same 800-foot height that it did two weeks ago, and took the same type of course: up, hover, move sideways, land.
More as I get it.
The future of space travel requires new technologies and additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, may hold the key.
The European Space Agency is investigates how the 3D printers and 3D printing technology could transform everything we think about space missions. Here's a look at 10 ways 3D printing could change space travel, courtesy of ESA scientists.
(Phys.org) —Move over, Matrix - astronomers have done you one better. They have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called "Illustris." Illustris can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution.
"Until now, no single simulation was able to reproduce the universe on both large and small scales simultaneously," says lead author Mark Vogelsberger (MIT/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who conducted the work in collaboration with researchers at several institutions, including the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany.
These results are being reported in the May 8th issue of the journal Nature.
Previous attempts to simulate the universe were hampered by lack of computing power and the complexities of the underlying physics. As a result those programs either were limited in resolution, or forced to focus on a small portion of the universe. Earlier simulations also had trouble modeling complex feedback from star formation, supernova explosions, and supermassive black holes.
The House Appropriations Committee recommended $17.9 billion in funding for NASA on Thursday, significantly boosting planetary science programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and continuing operation of a flying telescope.
Man space flight should have two goals...1. Asteroid mining 2. or terraforming of mars/venues. Otherwise, we should invest a lot more into probes and extrasolar planets.
It appears a feasible proposition, economically. That is the conclusion of a study that considered a European launch service based on a Skylon re-usable spaceplane.
The report, commissioned by the European Space Agency (Esa), was led by Reaction Engines Limited (REL) of Oxfordshire with help from a range of other contractors such as London Economics, QinetiQ and Thales Alenia Space (TAS).
It looked closely at how an operator of the UK-conceived vehicle might meet the demands of its market.
Russia has sent a European communications satellite into orbit from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean, after the last launch in 2013 ended with the satellite plunging into the sea.
The Zenit-3SL rocket blasted off at 2209 GMT on Monday from the Odyssey launch pad and reached its orbit around an hour later, said the Sea Launch international consortium, 95 percent of which is controlled by Russia.
"Sea Launch went according to plan. The control of the (satellite) has been handed over," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees Russia's space programme, wrote on Twitter.
Russia's space-rocket company Energia has said it plans to use the sea platform for four launches in 2014 and five in 2015.
Virgin Galactic has signed a deal with the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), which will allow it to charter space flights from its base in the US state of New Mexico.
The agreement lays out rules for how the flights will be integrated into US air space.
In a statement, Virgin Galactic said the deal brings it "another step closer" to commercial space flights.
The firm hopes to launch its first flight by the end of 2014.
