SpaceX to debut Falcon 9 Block 5 10th May, launching Bangabandhu-1 - Sensationalist Headlines

Live Stream: Coming soon Static fire: Completed Weather: 80% GO Block 5 is the final major upgrade to the Falcon 9, the culmination of over 10 years of development and evolution of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket. Block 5 has numerous advantages over past versions of the Falcon 9, notably including higher thrust engines, improved and more resilient recovery hardware, and the ability to be reflown within 48 hours of landing after a previous mission. Block 5 was also designed to meet – and in some cases exceed – NASA’s strict Commercial Crew Program requirements, which SpaceX must follow in order to be able to fly NASA astronauts, expected to begin in early 2019. Block 5 cores are also expected to be reused 10 times before undergoing any major refurbishment, and SpaceX hopes to fly each booster up to 100 times before it is retired. ... The payload on this flight is Bangabandhu-1, the first geostationary satellite from Bangladesh. The satellite was designed and built by Thales Alenia Space in France, based on their Spacebus-4000B2 platform. Once in orbit, it will be operated by Bangladesh Communication Satellite Company Limited. It weighs 3500kg – which is on the lighter end of the geostationary payloads launched by the Falcon 9. First Block 5 Falcon 9 static fires ahead of Bangabandhu Apart from some obvious visual changes in appearance, one of the major changes is that the landing legs can be retracted by recovery crews – a major change from the earlier landing legs, which have to be removed entirely. These legs are expected to be black, matching the black carbon fiber interstage. For a recovery that’s less harmful to the vehicle, the whole first stage will be covered in a thermal protection coating to help it better survive atmospheric reentry. Also, the older aluminum grid fins will be replaced with larger titanium fins of a new shape, which will survive reentry much better than aluminum fins. The new titanium grid fins will also provide better control for the vehicle as it descends towards its landing platform. ... Block 5 has also been designed to meet and exceed the strict NASA crew requirements. Improvements made to meet these needs include redesigning the composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) and the turbopumps on the Merlin 1D engines. The turbopumps on the engines were redesigned after SpaceX discovered some turbopumps were cracked on flown boosters and on rigorously ground-tested engines. NASA is requiring SpaceX to fly a “frozen” configuration of the Block 5 – meaning every vehicle is built the same way – successfully for at least 7 flights. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/02/first-falcon-9-block-5-readying-static-fire-mcgregor-rapid-reuse/

https://twitter.com/spiel2001/status/993180368722432000

This is the first American launch vehicle since the Space Shuttle which will carry humans to space. Privately designed and built. It's only about ten years since Obama set out the challenge for private space industries in favour of Project Constellation. Musk did really, incredibly well - SpaceX is just the best combination of value, style and sustainability we've seen for human flight. Just hope this rocket makes it.

the capsule isn't exactly done and that's the real important bit. hopefully in the next year it will be ready for a test flight though. congress is getting a bit antsy over the slow progress even though shuttle was delayed by like a decade in its development and that was with full funding for its development. As much as people are nostalgic for it, the shuttle was a huge waste of money for what we used it for, only building ISS was its best and most useful job, otherwise we were pretending to have a long term manned space program that couldn't stay up for more than a couple weeks while the USSR had cosmonauts up for months at a time

Yeah, there are bound to be delays in any man-carrying project out of abundance of caution, to be fair to them. As you say they're doing so, so much better than NASA has at pretty much any project. I remember reading about that incident in Mike Mullane's autobiography. Ridiculous stuff, and the fact that NASA was fully aware of the problems but didn't really do enough against it was never properly pursued or punished.

Atlas V will also carry astronauts (on Boeing's CST-100 Starliner), and might do so before Falcon 9. The current schedule has the first crewed Starliner in November and the first crewed Dragon in December, but there's a lot of suspicion both will be delayed more, since the uncrewed test flights aren't scheduled until August.

shuttle was too big to fail sadly. we should never have discontinued apollo CSM/Saturn1B as it was everything soyuz was at the time. With 20 years of development (not to mention total conversion from monolithic to integrated circuits) it would have been what orion is trying to be today, and we would not have ran into the problem of booster shortages that caused both the first shuttle disaster as well as the stagnation of US lifting vehicle construction.

That's impressive... Bangladesh's first satellite.

Press kit is out, launch at 20:12 UTC.

Launxh at 20:42 UTC https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/994632986006978560?s=19

Launch is now 21:47 UTC

Stream is up now.

Kinda worried about the weather. That sky on stream doesn't look too good, and there's a nasty thunderstorm line that just hit the mid-East Coast, which I suspect those clouds are a part of.

Aborted

Dang.

Looks like the computers didn't like something at T-0:00:58, countdown just rolled back to T-0:15:00, possibly delaying to tomorrow.

Since they started using cryo chilled fuel I don't think they have been capable of holding and actually launching again in the same window. So I doubt we will see it go today.

At the same time though they've been maintaining the stream. Generally they just cancel it like a minute after the abort.

SCRUBBED

Officially scrubbed, recycle to tomorrow.

Come back tomorrow lads.

apparently it was a ground systems error that caused the abort. the rocket and payload are in good health.

Not long now . I feel the fact the computer stopped 2 seconds into t- 60 seconds was an not to worry anomaly, it was a very fast response

Stream up now.

Stream is up

Stream has started.

Broll

The first successful flight of Block 5. This could be a red letter day for the industry. Now we just have to subsist on watching a launch every ~1.5 weeks for the next 4 months until CC demos... Are all F9 flights from here on going to be on block 5 boosters?

They are going to use up the old cores when possible I believe.

while 24 hour turnaround makes a good brag, I can't think of any launch that they would allow that to happen