Monday, March 26, 2007

SpaceX Demo Flight 2 Updates

Here is China's take on SpaceX:

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is offering the rocket, as well as an untested heavy-lift booster, for sale at about one-fifth current market rates.
So for the curious here is what happened:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has noted that the preliminary assessment of the Falcon I flight shows that the second stage shut down only a minute before schedule - and still managed to deploy its satellite mass simulator ring.

The shutdown appears to have been caused by the sloshing of propellant in the LOX tank, increasing observed oscillation, which would normally have been successfully dampened out by the second stage Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system. However, the impact on the second stage nozzle during separation caused a 'hard slew' correction, over-compensating previously simulated

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