Falcon 9 Quotes

The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest animal in the world, capable of speeds of at least 242 miles per hour and potentially more than 300 miles per hour, and is able to make turns that generate 27 Gs (one G is the force of gravity, and humans lose consciousness at 9 Gs).

Cats probably wouldn't need 9 lives if they wore tiny little helmets and didn't smoke cigarettes.

So, if we could use the same Falcon 9 rocket a thousand times, then the capital costs would go from being $60 million per flight to $60,000 per flight. Obviously, that’s a humongous difference.

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

Can—” She caught her lip in her teeth. “Can you tell me . . . ? How does one breathe?” Very unsteadily while those eyes gazed up at him. “Breathe?” “While kissing.” Not easy. He tried to moderate his voice. “In the usual manner, I imagine.” Her slender brows dipped. “At opportune moments,” he suggested. Her lips twisted up in that manner he both dreaded and longed for. “Through one’s nose, perhaps,” he said, because his only refuge was to continue speaking or to walk away. “Really?” She appeared unconvinced. And so, because her skepticism suited his need to have her lips beneath his again, he showed her how one breathed while kissing. To her soft gasp of surprise, he took her waist in his hands, bent to her mouth, and kissed her in truth this time. Her lips were warm and still, and then not still as he felt her eager beauty, tasted her, and made her respond. She held back at first, and then she gave herself up to it. Her mouth opened to him as though by nature, offering him a sweet breath of the temptation within. If he’d gone seeking an innocent with more ready hunger he could not have found her. But he had not wanted an innocent. He’d wanted no one, yet here he was with his hands on a girl he could not release, his tongue tracing the seam of sweet, full lips that she parted for him willingly. “Now, breathe,” he whispered against those lips, then he sought her deeper. She made sounds of surrender in the back of her throat. He wanted to run his hands over her body, to pull her to him and make her know what a real kiss could be. “Breathe.” God, she smelled so good. He could press his face against her neck and remain there simply breathing her. But he feared that if he enjoyed much more of Diantha Lucas he would be in a very bad way when it came to giving her over to her stepfather and subsequently her intended. A very bad way indeed. And she didn’t deserve it. Rule #9: A gentleman must always place a lady’s welfare before his own. She slipped her tongue alongside his, gasped a little whimper of pleasure, and he coaxed her lips open and showed her more than how to breathe. He showed her how he wanted her. It was a pity for Miss Lucas’s welfare that no gentleman could be found here, after all.

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A. Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it. When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.” The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct. Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk’s main advantages over other executives and competitors. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray,” Gracias said. “Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.” 9 LIFTOFF THE FALCON 9 HAS BECOME SPACEX’S WORKHORSE.

BOOKS/AUTHORS ON THE BACKS OF LIBRARY CARDS #1 Miguel Fernandez Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert/ No, David! by David Shannon #2 Akimi Hughes One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss/Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger #3 Andrew Peckleman Six Days of the Condor by James Grady/ Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott #4 Bridgette Wadge Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume/ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling #5 Sierra Russell The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder/ The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin #6 Yasmeen Smith-Snyder Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne/The Yak Who Yelled Yuck by Carol Pugliano-Martin #7 Sean Keegan Olivia by Ian Falconer/Unreal! by Paul Jennings #8 Haley Daley Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm/ A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle #9 Rose Vermette All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor/ Scat by Carl Hiaasen #10 Kayla Corson Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames/Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein #11 UNKNOWN/CHARLES CHILTINGTON #12 Kyle Keeley I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt/ The Napping House by Audrey

The Falcon 9’s two launch stages are engineered to return to earn. The first part of the rocket propels the rocket head and then returns to earth and lands where it fired from. This is done by using grid fins and the engines performing retry burning.

Human nature was such that most people were keen to see the remains of someone who had been more unfortunate than they. It affirmed their own tenuous hold on life.

But his goal was not merely to be a space entrepreneur. It was to get humanity to Mars. And that could not be done on a Falcon 9 or its beefed-up sibling, the Falcon Heavy. Falcons can fly only so high. “I could have made a lot of money, but I could not have made life multiplanetary,” he says.

For Elon Musk, this spectacle has turned into a familiar experience. SpaceX has metamorphosed from the joke of the aeronautics industry into one of its most consistent operators. SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station. Where the Falcon 1 blasting off from Kwajalein was the work of a start-up, the Falcon 9 taking off from Vandenberg is the work of an aerospace superpower. SpaceX can undercut its U.S. competitors—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences—on price by a ridiculous margin. It also offers U.S. customers a peace of mind that its rivals can’t. Where these competitors rely on Russian and other foreign suppliers, SpaceX makes all of its machines from scratch in the United States. Because of its low costs, SpaceX has once again made the United States a player in the worldwide commercial launch market. Its $60 million per launch cost is much less than what Europe and Japan charge and trumps even the relative bargains offered by the Russians and Chinese, who have the added benefit of decades of sunk government investment into their space programs as well as cheap labor. The

steward, bailiff, falconer, houndmaster

She’s a spiteful old

One of SpaceX’s biggest goals, Shotwell said, was to fly as often as possible. The company has never sought to make a fortune off each flight. It would rather make a little on each launch and keep the flights flowing. A Falcon 9 flight costs $60 million, and the company would like to see that figure drop to about $20 million through economies of scale and improvements in launch technology. SpaceX spent $2.5 billion to get four Dragon capsules to the ISS, nine flights with the Falcon 9, and five flights with the Falcon 1. It’s a price-per-launch total that the rest of the players in the industry cannot comprehend let alone aspire to. “I don’t know what those guys do with their money,” Shotwell said. “They are smoking it. I just don’t know.

Our Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles are truly American,” Musk said. “We design and manufacture our rockets in California and Texas.

The Seventh Seal

Along with the Falcon 1, it would build the Falcon 5. Per the name, this rocket would have five engines and could carry more weight—9,200 pounds—to low orbit around Earth. Crucially, the Falcon 5 could also theoretically reach the International Space Station for resupply missions—a capability that would open up SpaceX for some large NASA contracts.

The equipment for this undertaking is being designed, built, and managed by the Johns Hopkins APL.46 The contract for the mission’s launch was awarded to SpaceX in April of 2019, and the mission is scheduled for takeoff on a Falcon 9 craft in June of 2021.47 Of interest in addition to the mission itself is the fact that experts across the world will be watching for indications of success or failure. The European Space Agency has gone so far as to design what is being called a “companion mission,” a probe that will follow the DART

In his article for the aerospace publication, Zurbuchen wrote about how SpaceX had succeeded in the battle for talent with an inspiring goal. “I was a little bit nervous about betting on the immediate success of Falcon 9,” he wrote. “But in the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.” Too often in the modern aerospace world, he added, bureaucracy, rules, and a morbid fear of failure “poisoned” the workplace.