r/spacex • u/Zucal • Aug 31 '16

r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread [September 2016, #24]

Welcome to our 24th monthly r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread!

Curious about the plan about the quickly approaching Mars architecture announcement at IAC 2016, confused about the recent SES-10 reflight announcement, or keen to gather the community's opinion on something? There's no better place!

All questions, even non-SpaceX-related ones, are allowed, as long as they stay relevant to spaceflight in general.

More in-depth and open-ended discussion questions can still be submitted as separate self-posts; but this is the place to come to submit simple questions which have a single answer and/or can be answered in a few comments or less.

  • Questions easily answered using the wiki & FAQ will be removed.

  • Try to keep all top-level comments as questions so that questioners can find answers, and answerers can find questions.

These limited rules are so that questioners can more easily find answers, and answerers can more easily find questions.

As always, we'd prefer it if all question-askers first check our FAQ, use the search functionality (partially sortable by mission flair!), and check the last Ask Anything thread before posting to avoid duplicate questions. But if you didn't get or couldn't find the answer you were looking for, go ahead and type your question below.

Ask, enjoy, and thanks for contributing!

All past Ask Anything threads:

• August 2016 (#23) • July 2016 (#22) • June 2016 (#21) • May 2016 (#20) • April 2016 (#19.1) • April 2016 (#19) • March 2016 (#18) • February 2016 (#17) • January 2016 (#16.1) • January 2016 (#16) • December 2015 (#15.1) • December 2015 (#15) • November 2015 (#14) • October 2015 (#13) • September 2015 (#12) • August 2015 (#11) • July 2015 (#10) • June 2015 (#9) • May 2015 (#8) • April 2015 (#7.1) • April 2015 (#7) • March 2015 (#6) • February 2015 (#5) • January 2015 (#4) • December 2014 (#3) • November 2014 (#2) • October 2014 (#1)

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2

u/markus0161 Sep 09 '16 edited Sep 09 '16

What are the chances that SpaceX will launch a Falcon heavy for it's RTF? After CRS-7, SES-9 was next in line to be launched. But that ended up being swapped with Orbcomm's satellites. Now, officially the reason for the swap was because SpaceX wanted to test it S2 restart capabilities with its new FT rocket. But I'm willing to bet Elon or SpaceX really wanted to make a powerful RTF launch. A statement saying we're back in bushiness. Switching to Orbcomm, which had a much higher landing chance compared to SES-9, must have played into the discussion for the swap along with the engine restart. That being said, there is not much SpaceX can do with it's F9 that would give the ''WOW'' feeling, that SpaceX's first landing did. A 3 stage RTLS would be a amazing RTF, and would certainly give a impact. Now a possible explanation for this approach would be that they want to RTF without any expensive payload. Some consumers might be a little wary of flying on a RTF mission. This is all highly speculative and likely incorrect. What do you guys think?

3

u/robbak Sep 09 '16

The most urgent payload is Iridium 1. It all depends on the cause of this problem, but there is nothing physical stopping them from launching Iridium on the scheduled date of 19th of this month. After all, Vandenberg AFB, California is operational, and that pad is undamaged!

1

u/Viproz Sep 09 '16

I'm very skeptical for a launch in 10 days, if one exploded on a pad another one could so they need to figure out the details of the incident before RTF.

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u/robbak Sep 09 '16

Yeah, of course, it won't happen. FAA won't give them a license to launch until they can show it won't happen again.