SpaceX is a space transport services company whose mission is to reduce space transportation costs and enable the colonization of Mars. SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. It has developed several launch vehicles and spacecraft.

For more information, visit www.spacex.com. Image: Dragon v2 spaceXs next generation manned spacecraft ( SpaceX)

Elon Musk's SpaceX

How SpaceX disrupt Boeing, leapfrog NASA, and become a serious space company

WRITTEN BY Tim Fernholz, Octorber 21 2014 (Quartz)
In the private sector, the US, once the leader in satellite launches, now lags behind European and Russian competitors. An existing joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the United Launch Alliance (ULA), is using engines bought from a Russian state company until 2017. And as China and India show their prowess to catch-up to the advanced economies with cost-conscious space stations and Mars probes of their own, a US side-bet on commercial space companies has now become the most likely way for the US to get off the ground.

In 2014, NASA said it would pay SpaceX its largest single contract ever, $2.6 billion, to shuttle US astronauts up to the International Space Station (ISS). It’s one of two companies that will build vehicles to replace the discontinued space shuttle and return the US to the list of spacefaring nations. The other, SpaceX’s frequently testy competitor Boeing, will do the same job but at more than half again the cost—some $4.2 billion.

When NASA officials first got involved with SpaceX eight years ago, they thought they were hiring a temp worker for scut work—a so-called “space taxi” while the government focused on higher aims. But now the commercial project may be NASA’s best hope for getting humans into space.

In fact, SpaceX has a chance at beating the aerospace giant to be the first private company to fly humans into orbit. This is an enormous milestone for the firm, and also its most dangerous task so far. But building cost-effective space vehicles gives SpaceX a chance to save US space efforts from their own torpor.

Despite successes in planetary science, like the Curiosity rover on Mars, NASA’s manned space program has been floundering. The first plan to replace the space shuttle was cancelled; a new effort to send people to explore the solar system is behind schedule and over budget, to the point where it may be unfeasible. Even the basic effort of getting astronauts up to the ISS—real estate in which the US has invested $75 billion—has been outsourced to Russia.

A vanity project on a multi-planetary scale

Image: Elon Musk and His Rocket( Pintest )

Elon Musk (b. 1971) is a South African-born entrepreneur with degrees in business and physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Musk has no formal training in rocketry, but he does have an eye for new markets. He made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, and has since founded Tesla Motors and SolarCity—a solar energy company.

In the early 2000s, he and others saw the opening NASA was creating by retreating from the business of launching spacecraft to low earth orbit. When Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—or SpaceX in 2002 —going into competition with other, generally more-established companies such as Boeing and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences., it was, at best, a millionaire’s flight of fancy. He had made his fortune from tech startups Zip2 and PayPal, and was still two years away from starting Tesla, the electric-car firm.

Musk, as he will gladly tell you, has a vision: Colonize Mars and make humans a multi-planet civilization. He sees it as insurance against a global catastrophe that leads to human extinction. Per Musk, the only sensible policy in this universe is redundancy. Newly wealthy and with time on his hands, he concocted a scheme to send a greenhouse full of plants to Mars as a kind of grand gesture, but couldn’t find any cost-effective rocket to send it there, even on a multi-millionaire’s budget.

He did find people like Tom Mueller, a frustrated engineer at the conglomerate TRW’s aerospace division, who was building a rocket engine for fun in his garage. That—the largest liquid-fueled engine ever built by an an amateur—turned out to be the earliest version of the Merlin, which powers SpaceX’s rockets. Musk also met Hans Koenigsmann, a German engineer who became the company’s fourth technical employee, at a rocketry club launch in the Mojave desert. “My German accent helps in presentations,” Koenigsmann says. “When I say, ‘This will work,’ it is more convincing than other accents for some reason.”

Musk decided to start a company to provide the service he couldn’t find—an affordable ticket to Mars. Successful tech entrepreneurs love starting space companies: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Paul Allen (Microsoft), Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (Google), and Richard Branson (Virgin) are all involved in firms dedicated to space tech. Most are seen, to varying degrees, as vanity projects.

Nosek is now a member of SpaceX’s board of directors.

Article: ( SpaceX )

Musk’s Ultimate Goals

His biggest, dreamiest target is sending people to Mars—which does not make him unusual unless he can actually achieve it. He boasts that he could fly human passengers there for as little as $500,000 per seat, but in this case he may be over-promising.
As for whether Musk himself would go? “I would like to go to space, but I have to forgo that,” he told TIME in 2012, citing his five sons and multiple companies.

Image: SpaceX: Ten Things to Know - Musk’s Ultimate Goals ( TIMES)

The company’s outside fundraising strategy was simple: Turning to Musk’s deep-pocketed friends in Silicon Valley, who were more willing than hard-pressed New York financiers to take a flyer on something new. There was also an attractive quirk of the satellite launch business: Customers pre-pay to build their rocket. That meant if the company could prove its concept in a successful test, the company wouldn’t need to raise another round of working capital, protecting early investors’ stakes from dilution.

Article: SpaceX: Ten Things to Know - Musk’s Ultimate Goals ( TIMES)

SpaceX Has Done That Other Companies Haven’t

SpaceX scored its first big headline in 2010, when it became the first private company to launch a payload into orbit and return it to Earth intact—something only government agencies like NASA or Russia’s Roscosmos had done before. Its upright landing and recovery of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 21 2015, was another first. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, sent a rocket to the edge of space and landed it upright earlier this year, but it was a demonstration flight and did not achieve orbit.
Image: ( SpaceX)

Rockets are marvelous pieces of technology. They seem to rise in fairly stately fashion when you watch them launch, but to reach orbit they must fly at 7.7 km per second or about 18,000 miles per hour, nearly 25 times the speed of sound in air. Nothing else made by man goes that fast with people in it. Rockets are mostly fuel—for SpaceX, $200,000 worth of kerosene and liquid oxygen—with an almost delicate metal skin, mostly aluminum. Musk once asked an investor to imagine his 64 meter (224 ft) rocket, shrunk down to the size of a Coca-Cola can: The walls of the tiny explosive would be many times thinner than the drink in your hand.

It is easier and cheaper to use solid-fuel engines. That would typically make them the first choice of the company’s chief designer—also Musk—but for the fact they are harder to control once ignited. For safety’s sake, more complex liquid-fueled rockets are the standard for taking people to space. The engines are spidered with metal capillaries that use the vessel’s own chilled fuel as coolant to keep the 3-D printed nozzle from melting in the wash of its own exhaust. Human flight was always the standard to which Musk’s associates say he aspired; and so the Merlin was the first new liquid-fueled rocket engine to fly in the United States since the 1990s.

Rockets headed for space typically have two stages. The first stage provides the massive thrust to get into space; then it’s discarded, and the second stage glides the payload to its final destination in orbit. A satellite, encased in a custom-made carbon fiber fairing, or a Dragon space capsule full of cargo—someday, passengers—perches on top of the rocket at launch. SpaceX’s first rocket prototype, the Falcon 1, used one Merlin engine in its first stage. There are nine in the Falcon 9 rocket that is the company’s main product. And there will be 27 in the putative Falcon Heavy, as yet unrealized, for massive cargo—and trips to Mars.

Falcon, Merlin, Kestrel, and Dragon: Not the Victorian virtues—Enterprise, Endeavor, Discovery—honored by the space shuttles they replace, nor competitor NASA’s classical Atlas, Orion, Apollo, and Saturn. SpaceX’s machines were made by people who read pulp fantasy novels as children, or the paperback science fiction of Musk’s childhood in Pretoria, South Africa.

Article: Octorber 21 2014 (Quartz)
Image: Falcon 9 Rocket ( SpaceX)

Falcon 9 Rocket

Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the reliable and safe transport of satellites and the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. Falcon 9 is the first orbital class rocket capable of reflight. SpaceX believes rocket reusability is the key breakthrough needed to reduce the cost of access to space and enable people to live on other planets.

Falcon 9 was designed from the ground up for maximum reliability. Falcon 9’s simple two-stage configuration minimizes the number of separation events -- and with nine first-stage engines, it can safely complete its mission even in the event of an engine shutdown.

Falcon 9 made history in 2012 when it delivered Dragon into the correct orbit for rendezvous with the International Space Station, making SpaceX the first commercial company ever to visit the station. Since then Falcon 9 has made numerous trips to space, delivering satellites to orbit as well as delivering and returning cargo from the space station for NASA. Falcon 9, along with the Dragon spacecraft, was designed from the outset to deliver humans into space and under an agreement with NASA, SpaceX is actively working toward this goal.

Falcon 9's Launch and Function

FIRST STAGE

Falcon 9’s first stage incorporates nine Merlin engines and aluminum-lithium alloy tanks containing liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1) propellant. After ignition, a hold-before-release system ensures that all engines are verified for full-thrust performance before the rocket is released for flight. Then, with thrust greater than five 747s at full power, the Merlin engines launch the rocket to space. Unlike airplanes, a rocket's thrust actually increases with altitude; Falcon 9 generates more than 1.7 million pounds of thrust at sea level but gets up to over 1.8 million pounds of thrust in the vacuum of space. The first stage engines are gradually throttled near the end of first-stage flight to limit launch vehicle acceleration as the rocket’s mass decreases with the burning of fuel.

INTERSTAGE

The interstage is a composite structure that connects the first and second stages and holds the release and separation system. Falcon 9 uses an all-pneumatic stage separation system for low-shock, highly reliable separation that can be tested on the ground, unlike pyrotechnic systems used on most launch vehicles.

SECOND STAGE

The second stage, powered by a single Merlin vacuum engine, delivers Falcon 9’s payload to the desired orbit. The second stage engine ignites a few seconds after stage separation, and can be restarted multiple times to place multiple payloads into different orbits. For maximum reliability, the second stage has redundant igniter systems. Like the first stage, the second stage is made from a high-strength aluminum-lithium alloy.

PAYLOAD

Falcon 9 delivers payloads to space aboard the Dragon spacecraft or inside a composite fairing.

DRAGON SPACECRAFT

Dragon carries cargo in the spacecraft’s pressurized capsule and unpressurized trunk, which can also accommodate secondary payloads. In the future, Dragon will carry astronauts in the pressurized capsule as well.

Article: About Falcon 9 Rocket ( SpaceX)
Image: Artist’s concept of SpaceX’s planned spaceship on the moon ( SYFY)
Launch

How many tests could SpaceX fail?

WRITTEN BY Tim Fernholz, Octorber 21 2014 (Quartz)
The Space Exploration Technology rocket factory is a large, white hangar-like building near Los Angeles international airport, with a parking lot filled with late-model motorcycles and Tesla electric cars. The vast metal structure once churned out 747 fuselages for Boeing. When you get through the front doors, past security and a cubicle farm stretching the width of the building, there it is: Science fiction being wrought into shape, right in front of you.
Image: Dragon v2 spacexs next generation manned spacecraft ( Space X)

Kwajalein is an atoll in the Marshall Islands, home to a US Navy rocket test facility. “I don’t think there’s a place in the world with more corrosion,” Musk said of the place. “It was basically just a small little island with a tent on it,” said Giger. The rockets themselves had to be flown in on massive C-17 Globemaster aircraft.

They were prescient. In 2006, the first Falcon 1 launch ended with the rocket exploding over the launch pad at Kwajalein. A corroded fuel line was the culprit. In 2007, the second rocket failed before reaching orbit.

“The vehicle actually flew very far, and then didn’t make orbit, but at least it flew out of sight,” Koenigsmann, the German SpaceX engineer, said of the second launch. “It’s a difference whether the rocket comes back and hits the launch site and you collect debris, or that it goes away and then disappears somewhere. It doesn’t make a difference in the end, but for you personally it’s a different feeling.”

Despite those two failed launches, Nosek and another of Musk’s PayPal co-founders, Peter Thiel, invested $20 million in SpaceX through the venture-capital firm Founders Fund. NASA’s investment in the company had convinced them that Musk knew how to build rockets.

Even so, the fact that he hadn’t yet built a working one was proving tough for the fledgling company. Gwynne Shotwell, an experienced aerospace engineer who became SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, devoted much of her time to drumming up business for the unproven product. “I didn’t get to do as much engineering as I would have liked to, but continually convincing customers to invest in SpaceX, and to take the risk associated with buying launches from us,” she said. “I was focused on keeping the company alive, keeping people paid while we were struggling.”

The partners at Founders Fund calculated that three more failures after the first two attempts at Kwajalein would exhaust the firm’s remaining capital and the confidence of its customers. That would mean the end not only of SpaceX, but of the fund’s largest investment at that point.“I knew that would wipe [Musk] out,” Nosek says, “and I also knew that at the last point, we’d have to ask the hard question, how much would we be willing to spend?”

Nosek disappeared on a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the third launch, and returned to a mobile phone full of condolence texts. The rocket—which carried a cargo of three satellites and the ashes of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty on the original series of Star Trek—had been destroyed when a small amount of fuel remaining in the first-stage engine had ignited after separation, causing it to collide with the second stage.

That left just two launches before disaster. But each flight had gone further than the last. The company’s engineers were confident they understood the problem. “Between the third and the fourth flight we changed one number, nothing else,” Koenigsmann said. “That was the time we needed to separate the two stages.”

It was enough. In August 2008, the rocket put a dummy payload into orbit. A month later, another Falcon 1 would launch the company’s first contract satellite on behalf of the Malaysian government. SpaceX was viable, and NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion contract, one of two (the other went to Orbital Sciences, the veteran NASA contractor that replaced Rocketplane Kistler) to bring 20 tonnes of cargo to the ISS before 2016. In 2010, now launching from NASA facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX launched the first Falcon 9 rocket, which replaced the now discontinued Falcon 1. Soon after, with the maiden flight of the Dragon space capsule, SpaceX became the first private company to send a spacecraft into low-earth orbit and bring it back safely.

But SpaceX still had to show it could safely dock the Dragon, flying under remote control, at the Space Station. Imagine having to park your car in the world’s most expensive garage, from thousands of miles away, with the knowledge that even a tiny accident could end up destroying them both. Confident in the wake of the successful first flight, it proposed to NASA that it combine the two final tests of the Dragon—approaching the ISS and docking with it—into one, to save costs.

NASA officials were nervous. Radar problems forced the reprogramming of the capsule’s sensors mid-flight so the mission would not be aborted for fear of collision. But the link-up was successful. The company has flown three successful resupply missions so far, and the fourth is currently docked at the station. NASA’s side-bet on SpaceX had succeeded.

Article: What it took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to disrupt Boeing, leapfrog NASA, and become a serious space company (Quartz)

Image: Better, faster, cheaper. QUARTZ)

What is the ionosphere?

The ionosphere is the layer of our planet’s upper atmosphere between 75 km and 1000 km (or between 46 and 621 miles) where the sun’s energy and cosmic radiation ionize atoms. The solar and cosmic rays strip atoms in the area of one or more of their electrons, giving them a positive charge and leaving the electrons to act as free particles.

This is the part of the atmosphere where auroras occur. It overlaps the mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.

The ionosphere is important because the concentration of ions and free electrons allows it to reflect radio waves. This facilitates radio communications across distant points on Earth as well as between satellites and Earth.

During the day, X-rays and UV light from the sun provide energy that continuously knocks electrons from atoms, creating ions and free electrons. These separate particles are constantly colliding, recombining, and becoming electrically neutral atoms again. So at night, without the energy from the sun, more particles combine than are ionized and the ionosphere shrinks. While the cosmic radiation still affects this part of the atmosphere, only the atoms at the upper portion continue to be ionized.

2010

Elon Musk's Falcon 9 Rocket Tore a Hole in the Atmosphere


Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX made waves in 2017. It also tore a hole in the ionosphere.

Scientists have determined that the launch of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket on Aug. 24 punched a temporary hole into a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere nearly 560 miles wide. While the effect is not permanent, here is how the rocket impacted the ionosphere and what it means as humans move forward with space flight.

What happened during the SpaceX launch?

Formosat-5 mission Formosat-5 mission Courtesy of SpaceX Rather than fighting the force of gravity to fly straight up into the sky, rockets normally take a curving trajectory and travel nearly parallel to the planet’s surface at about 80 or 100 km above the Earth. This allows the space crafts to carry larger and heavier objects into orbit than would be physically possible with a vertical flight path.

For the Formosat-5 mission SpaceX flew in August 2017, the Falcon 9 rocket was carrying an Earth observation satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization that weighed just 475 kg — a light payload for the Falcon 9.

Since the satellite was light enough, the rocket took a nearly vertical path into space. This caused the Falcon 9 booster and second stage to create circular shockwaves and punch the large hole through the plasma of the ionosphere. The 559-mile hole lasted for up to three hours.

Is this a problem?

The hole caused by the SpaceX launch was only temporary, but as commercial rockets take more and more satellites into orbit, the disruptions in the ionosphere will happen more often. Private space companies received $3.9 billion in private investments during 2017 and the industry is projected to be worth nearly $3 trillion by 2040.

One consequence of this growth and an increased number of rockets tearing through the atmosphere could be errors in global position system (GPS) navigation, scientists say.

When the Falcon 9’s second stage rocket burnt through plasma in the ionosphere and created the hole about 13 minutes after launch, it likely caused about a one-meter error in GPS programs, according to a paper in Space Weather.

The lead author of the study, Charles C. H. Lin from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, describes a rocket launch like a small volcano erupting, unloading energy into the middle and upper atmosphere in a way that’s comparable to what we see from a magnetic storm.Currently, the impact from a single launch remains relatively insignificant.

"Without considering the rocket launch effects, there are errors from the ionosphere, troposphere, and other factors that will produce up to 20-meter errors or more,” he told Ars Technica.
But the impact will grow as space technology continues to develop.

Article By Gracy Donnelly March 26, 2018 (Fortune))

What is the ionosphere?

The ionosphere is the layer of our planet’s upper atmosphere between 75 km and 1000 km (or between 46 and 621 miles) where the sun’s energy and cosmic radiation ionize atoms. The solar and cosmic rays strip atoms in the area of one or more of their electrons, giving them a positive charge and leaving the electrons to act as free particles.

This is the part of the atmosphere where auroras occur. It overlaps the mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.

The ionosphere is important because the concentration of ions and free electrons allows it to reflect radio waves. This facilitates radio communications across distant points on Earth as well as between satellites and Earth.

During the day, X-rays and UV light from the sun provide energy that continuously knocks electrons from atoms, creating ions and free electrons. These separate particles are constantly colliding, recombining, and becoming electrically neutral atoms again. So at night, without the energy from the sun, more particles combine than are ionized and the ionosphere shrinks. While the cosmic radiation still affects this part of the atmosphere, only the atoms at the upper portion continue to be ionized.

2010
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