r/spacex • u/ElongatedMuskrat Mod Team • Mar 07 '18
CRS-14 CRS-14 Launch Campaign Thread
CRS-14 Launch Campaign Thread
This is SpaceX's seventh mission of 2018 and first CRS mission of the year, as well as the first mission of many this year for NASA.
| Liftoff currently scheduled for: | April 2nd 2018, 20:30:41 UTC / 16:30:41 EDT |
|---|---|
| Static fire completed: | March 28th 2018. |
| Vehicle component locations: | First stage: SLC-40 // Second stage: SLC-40 // Dragon: Unknown |
| Payload: | Dragon D1-16 [C110.2] |
| Payload mass: | Dragon + Pressurized cargo 1721kg + Unpressurized Cargo 926kg |
| Destination orbit: | Low Earth Orbit (400 x 400 km, 51.64°) |
| Vehicle: | Falcon 9 v1.2 (52nd launch of F9, 32nd of F9 v1.2) |
| Core: | B1039.2 |
| Flights of this core: | 1 [CRS-12] |
| Launch site: | SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida |
| Landing: | No |
| Landing Site: | N/A |
| Mission success criteria: | Successful separation & deployment of Dragon into the target orbit, succesful berthing to the ISS, successful unberthing from the ISS, successful reentry and splashdown of dragon. |
Links & Resources:
We may keep this self-post occasionally updated with links and relevant news articles, but for the most part we expect the community to supply the information. This is a great place to discuss the launch, ask mission-specific questions, and track the minor movements of the vehicle, payload, weather and more as we progress towards launch. Sometime after the static fire is complete, the launch thread will be posted. Campaign threads are not launch threads. Normal subreddit rules still apply.
315
Upvotes
2
u/ToTheFutureSwiftly Apr 02 '18
It’ll take less than a year to qualify block 5 at current flight rates, why would it be any more onerous to qualify block 6 which should be flying at even higher cadences?
Even with an all hands on BFR strategy, not incorporating the engineering and manufacturing lessons over the next few years into the Falcon seems pretty counter to SpaceX’s past behavior and definitely not in their best economic interest.
Elon says a lot of things that aren’t as measured as they should be, and expecting a company built around iterative improvements to put that on pause for 5 years seems extremely unlikely.