SpaceX In Orbit – Successful Launch of Falcon 9 Rocket
Photo: Jason Paur/Wired
By Jason Paur May 22, 2012
UPDATE 7:45 a.m. EDT — Elon Musk announced via Twitter the Guidance, Navigation and Control Bay doors successfully opened in orbit, “Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much nicer than HAL9000.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The second time’s the charm for SpaceX. This morning at 3:44 a.m. EDT the company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. After a faulty valve led to an aborted launch on Saturday, today’s successful flight marks the third of the Falcon 9 rocket, the second flight of the Dragon capsule, and the first flight for a commercial spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS).
After clearing the lightning towers, the million pounds of thrust provided by nine Merlin engines slowly lifted the rocket into the dark sky. The accelerating Falcon 9 and Dragon passed a critical stage called “max Q” one minute and 24 seconds after liftoff. This marks the time when the launch vehicle experiences the maximum dynamic pressure on its structure during the flight thanks to a combination of relatively thick atmosphere and the increasing velocity of the rocket. Once past max Q, rockets continue to accelerate but do so in a rapidly thinning atmosphere, thus reducing their aerodynamic load and stress.
The nine engines of the first stage shut down three minutes after launch, at which time there was no glow and only a faint trail of smoke visible in the night sky. Five seconds later the second stage containing the Dragon capsule separated from the first stage. An orange glow reappeared in the sky as the second stage ignited and burned for six minutes and two seconds, placing the Dragon into an orbital path to begin its chase of the ISS.
Just under 10 minutes after launch SpaceX announced Dragon successfully reached orbit. A few minutes later, loud cheers washed over SpaceX’s factory floor as Dragon successfully deployed its solar panels.
The Dragon receives power from batteries and the pair of solar arrays. The next big event will be the opening of the Guidance, Navigation and Control Bay door in two hours and 27 minutes after launch. When the door opens, it is the first step toward the rendezvous with the ISS, according to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.
“This is a key new feature for this mission, which basically exposes the Proximity Operations Sensors to space so we can see the ISS as we are approaching and allow us to get close enough to berth,” Shotwell explained in a press conference on May 19. “Our star trackers also get a view of space at this time, so this is a very critical operation”
After confirming the navigation and thermal imaging capabilities, the Dragon will go through a series of maneuvers testing the use of the Draco thrusters. These tests will demonstrate the capsule’s ability to abort a maneuver with both a continuous burn of the small thrusters built into the capsule, as well as an abort using short pulses from the Dracos.
All of these initial tasks take place far from the ISS in the first 11 hours while the Dragon is chasing down the station. On day two, the Dragon will adjust its orbit toward the station and on day three it will perform the first flyby to 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) beneath the ISS.
Day three is filled with a series of maneuvers that inch Dragon closer and closer to the space station until it is finally brought in by the station’s robotic arm at the end of day four.
Enthusiasm for today’s successful launch was evident from SpaceX employees hosting the webcast who were jumping and cheering at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters after the liftoff. But the company knows there are still many challenges ahead — getting to orbit is just the first step needed by the SpaceX team before getting the seal of approval from its potential customer, NASA. All of the demonstrations must be completed before the agency can sign off on SpaceX providing regular cargo resupply missions to the ISS.
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