SpaceX

A Brief History of New Human Space Revolution

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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

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

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 )

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.

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

Recent SpaceX

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