The Falcon 9 rocket aced a static fire test that lasted almost three minutes, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) announced Sunday.
That full mission-length firing in a vertical test stand at the SpaceX McGregor test facility in Texas lasted 178 seconds, SpaceX stated.
At full power, the rocket generated 855,000 pounds of force at sea level. In vacuum, the thrust increases to approximately one million pounds or four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft.
The test consumed over half a million pounds of propellant. All nine engines fired for 160 seconds, then two engines were shut down to limit acceleration and the remaining seven engines continued firing for 18 more seconds, as would occur in a typical climb to orbit.
The test firing validated the design using nine engines on the first stage, as well as the ability to shut down engines without affecting functioning of the remaining engines. This demonstrates the ability of Falcon 9 to lose engines in flight and still complete its mission successfully, much as a commercial airliner is designed to be safe in the event of an engine loss.
Like an airliner, the Falcon 9 engines are enclosed in a protective sheath that ensures a fire or destructive loss of an engine doesn’t affect the rest of the vehicle.
The Falcon 9 will be the first vehicle since the Saturn V and Saturn 1 to have the ability to lose any engine/motor and still be able to complete its mission without loss of crew or spacecraft. Engine-out reliability proved crucial to mission success on two of the Saturn V flights.
“In the past month, we performed significant upgrades to the test stand and flame trench in preparation for this test,” said Tom Mueller, vice president of propulsion for SpaceX. “We added the flight base heat shields around the engines to protect the bottom of the rocket from the prolonged blast of heat and vibration.”
“The full mission-length test firing clears the highest hurdle for the Falcon 9 first stage before launch,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “In the next few months, we will have the first Falcon 9 flight vehicle on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, [Fla.,] preparing for lift-off in 2009.”
NASA is providing seed money to SpaceX and to Orbital Sciences Corp. [ORB] to spur development of commercial orbital transportation services (COTS) that could provide logistics supplying the International Space Station in the first half of the next decade.
President Bush ordered the space shuttles fleet to retire in 2010, and the next-generation U.S. spaceship system Orion-Ares won’t have its first manned flight until 2015. Therefore, NASA wishes to buy commercial space transport supply services from private companies during that half-decade gap, while paying Russia to transport U.S. astronauts to and from the space station, which was built with $100 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ funds.
Russia will use Soyuz space vehicles on those flights.