#falcon 1

Inktober Day 15: Legend 

Welcome to KSP Weekly! On this day, only 10 years ago, we witnessed the first ever private spacecraft launch into orbit. We are talking, of course, about SpaceX’s Falcon 1, an expendable launch system privately developed and manufactured from the ground up by Elon Musk’s company from 2006 – 2009.

The two-stage-to-orbit rocket used Liquid Oxygen and Rocket Propellant-1 for both stages, the first powered by a single Merlin engine and the second powered by a single Kestrel engine. The vehicle was launched a total of five times. Falcon 1 achieved orbit on its fourth attempt, on September 28, 2008, with a mass-simulator as a payload. On July 14, 2009, Falcon 1 made its final flight and successfully delivered the Malaysian RazakSAT satellite to orbit on SpaceX's first commercial launch (fifth launch overall). Following its fifth launch, the Falcon 1 was retired and succeeded by Falcon 9.

According to SpaceX, the Falcon 1 was designed to minimize price-per-launch for low-Earth-orbit satellites, increase reliability, and optimize flight environment and time to launch. It was also used to verify components and structural design concepts that would be reused in the Falcon 9. SpaceX started with the idea that the smallest useful orbital rocket was the minimum viable product (with about 1000 lbs to orbit), instead of building something larger and more complicated, and then running out of money and going bankrupt. Unlike Falcon 9, the first stage was originally planned to return by parachute to a water landing and be recovered for reuse, but this capability was never demonstrated. The second stage was not designed to be reusable.

One of the keys to SpaceX’s success has been its ability to fail – and move on. Despite setbacks, the company was able to quickly learn from its mistakes, make adjustments, and try again. As a result, within 16 years, SpaceX has gone from conceptualizing privately funded, reusable rockets to launching the most powerful rocket we have seen in nearly half a century. Along the way, SpaceX became the only private company capable of returning a spacecraft from low Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in 2010. The company made history again in 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station. The company also successfully achieved the historic first re-flight of an orbital class rocket in 2017, and the company now regularly launches flight-proven rockets. In 2018, SpaceX began launching Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket by a factor of two.

Perhaps most importantly, SpaceX has helped to reignite the public’s interest in space. Witnessing their feats and ambitious goals come to fruition certainly has inspired countless people, youth in particular, to pursue math, engineering, aeronautics, and astronomy both academically and professionally. SpaceX has helped leverage efforts by NASA and JPL to enforce the idea that having a career in the space industry – even actually going to space – is as real, tangible, and achievable as any other job that requires focus and hard work.

[Development news start here]

It wasn’t that long ago since Update 1.5 was conceptualized and development began, always with the goal of pushing KSP forward and delivering a substantial new update that will improve the players’ experience. Whether it is with bug fixes, giving existing parts a revamp, or brand new features for both the base game and the expansion, this update has something for everyone. We are far from over with KSP and there’s still plenty to come, but we are now at a point in development where we are confident enough with the development of this update to share with you all that Kerbal Space Program 1.5: Dressed for Success comes out this October.

We improved the burn time indicator by recalculating based on dV and not acceleration. We’ve also added a staging indicator that shows which stages contain the dV needed to complete each part of the maneuver. This will show a red section at the end if there’s not enough dV in the current vessel to complete that maneuver. We’ll continue looking at ways to leverage this dV information going forward. In the extended mode of the burn time indicator two extra lines are shown, allowing you to adjust how much time you want to spend burning before and after the node during the maneuver as well as showing you a countdown for when you need to start burning fuel to do so.

In other news, we continue with the parts revamp effort and this week it is time to put the Probodobodyne RoveMate Command Module in the spotlight. The artist reworked the geometry of the RoveMate, and created a new texture map using diffuse, normal and specular maps for this part. You can see a comparison between the old and new RoveMate in the image below.

The RoveMate Command Module will now be available in 3 variants, each of them inspired by different real-life analogues, such as the Curiosity and the Sojourner rovers. Both the gold and silver variants received a new shader that makes their new tin foil shine and interact with light as other parts we’ve shown. However,  if you look closely you’ll notice that despite the obvious similarities, there are some neat differences in the details: the former has a tighter aluminum cloth appearance, while the latter receives a looser tin foil look. Check out these gifs to see the new White, Silver and Gold RoveMate variants in motion.

Click here to see the high-res images

On top of all of the above-mentioned details, the orientation issue with this part has been corrected and a few new attachment nodes on the sides of this part were added. This will certainly help to expand the creative usage for this part.

The team is also revisiting some relatively new parts included in the Making History Expansion. Such is the case of the FLOOYD Labs’ SM-18 Service Module, which received a modest makeover. For this part the team made a few corrections to the caps’ texture maps and included the shiny shader to the tin foil cap. Check out this gif to see how the new SM-18 Service Module looks in motion.

Click here to see the high-res image 

The team also did some good ol’ bug fixing this week, too! You will be glad to hear that with Update 1.5 you will not experience that annoying NullReferenceException that some players got when saving a mission where the craft files used in vessel situations had been deleted. Kerbals will not explode when resuming a test mission either. Additionally, the normal texture maps of the mobile, Woomerang and Dessert launch pads have been fixed.

[KSP Vault]

This week in the KSP Vault…

Forum users kl0buk and Ferrdo_Kerman built one of the best-looking control panels for Kerbal Space Program we’ve encountered and opened this thread to share the development process of making them.

To celebrate the end of the weekly challenges in the KSP subreddit, Matt Lowne made this video where he talks about his personal experience with the challenges and executes the very first one the subreddit presented.

We encountered this beautiful watercolor depiction of our favorite trio while navigating through the World Wide Web and we wanted to share it with you all. By LazyClock: 

Have you seen cool KSP-related content that you consider worth highlighting? Share it with us and help us give content creators more exposure. :)

Remember that you can also share and download missions on Curse, KerbalX, the KSP Forum and the KSP Steam Workshop.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!

*Information Source:

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/Entreps/6-17-05.htm

Chang, K. (2016, September 27). Elon Musk's Plan: Get Humans to Mars, and Beyond. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-mars-exploration.html

S. (2012, November 28). Company. Retrieved from https://www.spacex.com/about

Falcon Launch Report | Successful launch for Falcon 1 rocket. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://spaceflightnow.com/falcon/004/index.html