Abandoned SpaceX Rocket Designs - Falcon 1e, 5, 9S5, 9S9 & Air
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- Опубликовано: 8 июн 2020
- SpaceX developed several rocket designs which ultimately never flew for various reasons, it's interesting to look at these in retrospect now that SpaceX has settled on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy while it develops the radically different Starship design.
There’s a whole separate follow up video on other abandoned concepts which were never rocket designs. 
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At roughly 8.5 minutes long and a total of 56 utterances of falcon, Scott's Falcon's per minute (FPM) in this video averaged at 6.65
Acknowledged
“We need to name it after something great.”
“How about the most famous Star Wars ship?”
“Right. We now name it the royal Naboo cruiser.”
“.....Kyle, you’re fired.”
disney has entered the chat...
“No, no, I meant we call it the Star Destroyer Booster!”
“… You're still fired.”
Elon: *Rejects 'Royal Naboo cruiser'*
Also Elon: *Blatantly rips off the Naboo chrome-covered aesthetic for his own Starship*
@@InventorZahran We need to make calling the Starship the "Royal Naboo Cruiser" a thing.
Lets see some ID nope.
Sounds like apple products
I mean seriously, 1E, 9S5, Falcon 9 AIR?!
You should be glad they didn't name any of it Falcon 9s Pro Max
It actually makes a lot of sense. Falcon 1e must have been a 5th iteration of Falcon 1 rocket. 9S5 is Falcon 9 with Side mounted Falcon 5 boosters. Falcon Air is air launched version. Nice and easy to understand what it is from model name.
Hekssas Yea i know, just sayin it sounds like apple could have named them
Still can't forgive them killing Apple IIGS.
Bastards!
Maybe Apple stole their idea.
4:27
The Falcon Heavy then had a lower payload to GTO than the modern Falcon 9 in a reusable configuration does.
Merlin magic
tank STRETCH
Both
Let’s go Starship heavy will have 3 starship boosters strapped together
* N-1 heavy
Ferr Gefalschte uh oh that sounds like a massive bomb
Saturn 5 Heavy.
Starship 2.0 with a diameter of 18 meters is way better.
@@johntheux9238 In future after Starship a bigger ship will be built
0:33 they must’ve forgotten to take down that tent before the launch lol
It looked like the trinity footage. Lol.
Lol good catch
RIP tent. Press F so it’s memory may live on
Budget is low man, the tent´s gotta go.
Line item on the insurance report AND a tax deduction. Elon knew how multi-billion dollar companies worked even way back then.
I find this kind of evolution fascinating. The good startups are the ones that adapt their vision and products to engineering and market reality continuously, and very quickly. By the way that constant product evolution makes engineering very uncomfortable usually, as you have to adapt projects all the time - and investors don’t like it either. But the stubborn ones stuck on the original vision and product, usually coupled with very loud marketing claims, almost never make it.
I guess there is a compromise that needs to be found.
You need to be able to let something go if you have a better alternative.
But if your concept is great you need the balls to stick to it.
Alioth Ancalagon this is very true you need to be just focused enough to actually finish something but just ADD enough to instantly start on the next iteration or pivot from something that looks like it won’t be worth it.
Challenge: One drink every time Scott says "Falcon". See you tomorrow!
ksp and scott manley drinking games are the best.
WOW! Not until noon.
Try this : drink when u hear falcon, space x, nasa, see you in hospital 😉
He only said falcon 60 times. Give Scott a break lol.
I want a liver tho
Your ability to put out such detailed videos so frequently and effortlessly is amazing. I thoroughly appreciate your channel. Kudos.
SpaceX: posts a video of fairing deployment.
Scott: posts
Me: holy **** that was fast.... Oh. Nevermind
later!
@@scottmanley looking forward to it!
@@scottmanley Do a video on Falcon X and Falcon XX with abandoned Merlin 2 engines!
Scott Mamet oh awesome!
@@scottmanley give it to us Daddy!
Coming soon: Starship Nuclear with liquid core nuclear thermal rocket engine, like the old Liberty Ship concept. Bring it!
Like Project Orion, with nuclear bombs?
That's not something you want operating in an atmosphere, even with an outer ring of Raptor engines for takeoff and landing. It makes more sense to build it as a separate spacecraft, small enough to be launched in a Starship Cargo payload bay. It carries an inboard liquid methane tank, and is able to attach to the standard hose fittings on a Starship upper stage used for orbital refuelling. This means it can be refuellled by a Starship Tanker, and stays in orbit once it's been activated keeping the radiation away from inhabited places, and reducing contamination in the event of a crash.
You launch a passenger/cargo Starship for Mars as normal, but while you refill the methane tanks fully, you only need enough oxidiser for the landing at the other end. You also top off the inboard tank on the nuclear stage. After fuelling is done. this rendezvouses with the Starship, connecting to it's tanks. You can use the inboard methane tank and some Starship methane in a methane propellant NTR to get more than twice the specific impulse of a purely methalox Starship, increasing delta V. Excluding a chunk of the LOX would also reduce the GTOW as liquid oxygen is over 3/4 of the mass, further increasing delta V.
This means you either have wider transfer windows, or can do faster transfers. At Mars, the Starship undocks with just enough methane and LOX to perform the landing. The nuclear stage stays in orbit, and gets refuelled by a tanker just before it's used for a Starship to travel back to Earth.
@@stainlesssteelfox1 just add that you'd need enough propellant in the nuclear stage to place it in Mars orbit.
@@stainlesssteelfox1 How would you get the nuclear stage and/or it's fuel into orbit without posing most of the same risks in the first place though?
An accident with a nuclear rocket would be bad whether the rocket is operating under it's own power when it happens or is just the payload on another rocket...
@@KuraIthys If it has never been run, the fuel in a nuclear rocket is just uranium oxides. With a half life of 700 million years for U235 and 4.5 billion years for U238, Uranium has a pretty low activity regardless of enrichment level. Not something you'd want to ingest but that's basically because it'll give you heavy metal poisoning. If you somehow managed to ingest enough uranium for it's radioactivity to cause health problems, you'd be too busy being dead from it's plain old chemically toxic effects to care.
Once you've run your reactor however, you now have an unhappy mix of actinides and fission products in with your fuel. These are much shorter lived and much more radioactive and will very much give you radiation poisoning.
Spacex: that friend that skips tutorial and is successful doing so
wow no comen
@@parallaxperception4971 woe 1 comeeent
Then I'm the SpaceX of KSP
Elon: "breathes"
Scott: 10 thing you missed in . . . . .
RL-10 on a Falcon - now I've seen everything!
Honestly, the Falcon Heavy *needs* an RL-10 third stage to be viable for deep space missions. I ran the numbers on that for a certain internship to prove a point. Numbers-wise, you can basically drop a Delta IV second stage on top of the Falcon Heavy second stage and put your payload on top of that whole stack. The math works out to something like 18 tons to a Saturn transfer trajectory.
Edit: don't quote me on the specifics there, I remember it being a very large number relatively speaking to one of Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus.
Joe Murphy Falcon heavy have no third stage.
It is too expensive. If SpaceX wants a hydrogen upper stage, they’ll probably make their own engine.
Kerbodynamic X Falcon heavy can have RL-10 stage as third stage inside the fairing is what he is saying.
@@kerbodynamicx472 hydrogen engines are extremely expensive to develop from scratch, which is why they said they won't try. Elon has said it would sink SpaceX to go down that route (which at the time was probably true). It would cost ~$5 billion upfront to develop a new engine vs the tens of millions that each RL-10 costs per launch. So naturally if you aren't using this configuration a lot, the RL-10 solution makes much more sense.
1:45 Perhaps this is where Peter Beck got the idea for Electron Heavy...
Perhaps, more probably as electron looks like an miniature falcon 9.
It should be 'Muon' rather than 'Electron heavy'
Except that there is no idea...
@aviagamer ...
Air launching rockets is one of those odd things that looks obvious and easy, but turns out to be very hard, very expensive - and, ultimately, pretty pointless. Turns out it's easier just to stick the rocket on the ground, point it upwards, and light the blue touchpaper.
Where did you find the early PR material? I could actually use that in my research.
IF you're doing 'research', how come you are unable to find basic materials that even someone from a YT video managed to find?
@@lukasdon0007 scott probably has better sources for information since at this point hes a professional science communicator
@@lukasdon0007people are different, they have different brains, search for different things on different sources.
A helping hand on your research isn't something to be ashamed of, it's standing on the shoulders of giants.
Thank you Scott. This video is very important because the failures and explosions are part of the history too. The SpaceX channel does not show videos from the CRS-7 and Amos-6 failures but they should. Gwynne on an interview told us that is part of the learning process (in her words), so she is truly not ashamed of those failures. I like her. It's a pity that the cooperation between SpaceX and Statolaunch ended because that would have provided us wonderful images. You fly very safe! :-)
If the number designates the number of engines, I would love to see a 'millenium falcon' design. Mixing up units of time with units of distance (or amounts in this case) is pretty much as Star Wars as you can get.
or just put a thousand engines on that thing!
Scott's lighting/camera setups are as consistent as orbital trajectories in a three-body problem :D
I love seeing these cut or abandoned proposals/cut content
Scott you’re the freaking best man, excellent work per usual! 👍🏻👍🏻
“Propellant Crossfeed,” oof. Someday we’ll get those magical fuel lines from KSP I’m sure.
Your channel has grown so much, that I doubt you're still reading every comment. But seriously; thank you for such great content that cannot be found anywhere else.
I ran mission assurance as a young Air Force officer at Vandenberg for the first Falcon 1 static fire. My buddy did it for Kwaj when it blew up
Thanks for the like, Scott. . That was the first time a fully-integrated Falcon rocket was fired. Release the clamps and it was headed to orbit. We refurbished an old Thor launch site for this, adjacent to where they now launch Falcon 9's. Falcon 1 is REMARKABLY similar to Thor. I still have the checklist with my notes in the margins. Do you know anyone who might like to buy that piece of memorabilia?
I might.....
@@scottmanley How do I reach you? I can dig that up and send you some pics.
Almost one year for this vid got uploaded I still remember the day when this vid was uploaded. Time flies
Their original concept of a Falcon Heavy was just so adorably quaint.
Excellent reporting as usual Scott!
Falcon 1e is announced.
"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon!?"
🤣🤣🤣
Go for Papa Palpatine!
You guys have been just flying around in that capsule for 2 days trying to get to the space station? You must smell like... feet... wrapped in leathery... burnt... bacon.
Just a name they gave for a can of "re-purposed" Bud Ice...
@@TonboIV "......I threw the Senate at him!"
"none of these ever flew" Oh, they flew all right... Right out the window!
Combination Award for coolest outro words and best haircut goes toooo Scott Manley ! Great show !
Great content as always
Thanks, Scott awesome Vlog thank you
great video! I love it
This really shows how kerbal the beginnings of SpaceX really were. Beautiful!
I love Scott's videos! Always so interesting. I thought he was wearing a funny hat in this one, but it was only the imperial shuttle in behind.
New "fly safe"... Great video!
Finally some new stuff to hear about... so refreshing 😛
Take a half step to the left lol you have an antenna on your head! Great video, fly safe!
I was about to say Teletubbies 😂
I love how in this kind of old footage of the first steps of a launch corporation you can see the how they learn just what kind of damage a rocket launch can do. Such as that first Iranian launch from the launch vehicle that tore the door open, or the poor shed here at 0:37 that gets torn to ribbons.
Probably a tent not a shed.
Air launched falcon? Amazing
Annoys me how they ditched it and kinda fucked stratolaunch over, probably due to profit too...
@@ericlotze7724 If the issue was money Paul Allan and friends would have dealt with that. Probably Space X didn't have enough engineers to work on contradicting Falcon designs. Look at how 'sharing' worked out for the Joint Strike Fighter or look at the enormous cost for the F35 because they want one platform to be everything. As Steve Jobs said: "Focus is about saying no!"
Stratolaunch should have taken over the rocket design and just buy some Merlin engines from Space X.
Thanks for providing such great content!
I think the most interesting thing about the early Falcon Heavy plans was the propellant cross-feed. I understand that the plumbing became too much of a hassle but the performance gains would have been amazing.
That's why they can't make a falcon superheavy, without crossfeed it's an huge waste of power.
@@johntheux9238 Actually most of the payloads initially planned for the Falcon 9 Heavy were able to be launched on a single stick Falcon 9.
Hello Scott
I wanted to ask if you could make a playlist of videos like going nuclear about star Evolution and different kinds of stars.
I am not sure if you already made some Videos about it. But going nuclear seems like a comprehensive guide.
Wosh you all the best thank you for making great videos 🙂
Good insights. Now off to the drawing board to make those dreams a reality...
Hi Scott, no video about the Spacex ama session? Thanks for all the other great content!
I took a road trip (2000 km one way, 6000 km total in 12 days) to Florida to see the second Falcon Heavy (ARABSAT 6A) launch. For as along as I live, it will be something to smile about. I ate a lot of fresh fish and drank many Yuenglings and made new friends. I swam in the gulf and in the Atlantic. I hope to make similar trips in the years to come.
Seems like they learned the lesson to just focus on a few really important products rather than many mediocre ones.
Thank you for yet another very informative video, Scott! :)
Wow 1.7 K views in 10 min . nice work 👍🏻
That's the falkin' one, right there!
Also the original Falcon Heavy would have inter-connected the booster fuel tanks to the core rocket, refueling the core as it flew. By the time the booster tanks ran dry and separated the core would be almost fully fueled. This concept was dropped, probably because it was too complex, and also to allow the boosters to retain enough fuel to fly back and land.
Fascinating!
Please do more videos like this with planned launch vehicles or spacecraft
Good video, as always, thanks.
Scott would you consider adding cost / kg on graphs like @4:20?
I like how at the end F9 IMO became the best rocket in the world: cheap, reliable, capable workhorse
I was out on Kwajalein and saw the falcon 1 launches. There was an awesome party when they finally got it right.
Yay, Scott video
this is so cool
Last time I was this early, Scott was still just a KSP streamer!
You forgot to mention the Falcon X, X Heavy, and XX.
Yep - although getting details might be harder for those.
No, those were never announced, they were merely rough sketches of what the Merlin 2 would enable. There’s another video in the subject soon
Are we expecting that line to continue with the Falcon 46-XX, Falcon 46-XY, Falcon 47-XXY and so on?
@@scottmanley Fair enough.
@@Sableagle lol. What...
Hmmh. Now you're making me wonder if anyone ever had a 47-XXX or XYY...
Seems unlikely, but then again, ending up with XXY seems unlikely too, given the implications...
While the Falcon 5 never flew SpaceX did bend metal on at least one. I was able to take a tour of the old factory and saw it sitting next to the first Dragon capsule which at the time consisted of just 3 bent metal tubes welded together.
This "fly safe" sounded kind of inquisitive
Slightly off topic, but can you believe how the launch cadence of SpaceX is accelerating. 3 Starlink launches and 180 Satellites in 3 weeks?! Got to be making some records. At least right now Jun 3 was successful and there are 2 more scheduled by end of the month, with another non-starlink launch close by as well. There may be something to this reusability after all. Nice review of the designs Scott. I had always wondered about some of the trade offs with air launch, and hadn't really thought about it in depth. But you pointed out the (should have been obvious) unique structural requirements for being hung from a plane, thanks.
Your theme music at the end reminds me of the music on the old early-1990s game "Lemmings". haha
I would love to see a video on the potential performance of a Falcon 1 using a Merlin D full thrust engine, and how that compares to the current small sat offerings.
Can You make a video about the detailed sequence of events of the Falcon 9 first stage from touchdown until its prepared for towing
Awesome
wow falcon 1e sounded really cool and feasible
No mention of the Falcon X and Falcon XX? Even if only to say that those never existed beyond the single PowerPoint slide that circulated on the internet?
Someone else commented that and Scott has said he's going to cover those soon.
Falcon XXX was scrapped immediately too.
"What the hell is an 'Aluminum Falcon'!?!" "Actually, it's the Falcon 1e"...
i love your chanel learned a lot thanks
The end is good. “Fly safe” 😎
Fascinating episode once again! May I ask... how did you get those awesome kerbal figurines there in the back?! Are they for sale somewhere?
Great Video!
Great video. Are there not a few more missing designs though? Falcon X, Falcon XX, the original Hydrolox Raptor concept?
That’s a separate video
Rapid iteration and evolution in action. It must be frustrating for competitors, knowing that whatever target you set will likely be updated or even abandoned before you can match it.
Very interesting to hear this history. I remember hearing that Musk said air-launched rockets were a poor value proposition - I didn't realize it was something they'd actually explored.
i just noticed that pink lego space man. so cute.
and is it standing in front of a 3d printed SRB?
lol. Didn't notice that.
Even though I have one of those on the shelf behind me.
It's ironic because those are the early 80's style spacemen.
But in the 80's they only came in Yellow, blue, and rarely, white. (then again up until the 90's you pretty much only got lego in Red, Blue, Yellow, White & black most of the time, and Grey, brown or Green for some very specific kinds of parts)
The pink 80's style lego spaceman only exists because of the lego movie tie-ins...
...
OK, I'm going to go now. Too much nerdiness coming out in one go. XD
Looks like every scrapped Falcon design *didn't* have landing legs. It's not hard to imagine that once SpaceX had a chance at reusable boosters, all plans for non-reusable were ditched.
They all had parachutes
Just come across your channel with thanks to your kerbal tutorials. Just wondering, do you work for SpaceX or NASA or someone similar, you have very interesting and informative videos, subscribed
Nah, this is just a hobby, which has worked out for the best because I’ve got no personal investment in anything I cover.
Next launch vehicles will be Falcon Spyder, Falcon GT and Falcon Superlaggera.
1:50 Damn-I thought my idea for a Falcon 1 Heavy was original! Though in my concept the core stages were supposed to use the modern engines and be heavily-stretched with landing ability, much more advanced than even the Falcon 1e...
Darn same here!
Scott, can you break down the new SpaceX fearing video.. lol
@Scott Manley , Have you seen "Nexus Space" (essentially os-marsx dev group)
Next do a video on some of ULA's abandoned designs.
It is unfortunate that the air launch mounts require such different engineering.
If only it were as easy as in ksp, where at worst we just need to add more struts!
benefits aren't great though.
Although not a booster, there was also the Red Dragon, the first SpaceX vehicle to Mars.
And Grey Dragon to fly some paying customers around the Moon and back.
0:34 , That Walmart-special canopy right next to the Falcon 1 launch site....
Somebody must have asked himself whether to move it or not and then thought.... "nah, it'll be fun seeing it being blown away".
When you said "Falcon 9 Air", I initially thought it was going to be a lighter, thinner, and less powerful variant (similar to the MacBook Air or iPad Air).
Falcon lite
The iPad Air (A12) has more power than the iPad (A10) and the MacBook Air has more power than the MacBook. So Air don't mean less Powerfull, and the iPad Pro is even thinner than the iPad Air
You forgot about the Russian ICBM! haha
Lol. Really early design ^^
I wonder what it would take to make the Soyuz reusable
I designed a one man pod to launch on the F1e I called the Wyvern that I thought would be useful for a) ISS escape pods, b) private space travel, c) USAF Space Command inspection vehicles.
well let me to see and watch the greatest space ship and its ongoing work...
If I had £1 for every time Scot said "Falcon" in this video, might be able to afford an actual falcon rocket.
xD
Do a video on the challenges of cross-feed
VERY NICE GOOD
Well that’s old SpaceX. Now let’s get hype for the future with Nuclear Starship/ Superheavy. I’m convinced that Elon is eventually going to dig up the old Sea Dragon concept at some point.
How could he not right?
The next SpaceX rocket that should end up on the asheap of history is Starship. Time to start over.
@@DavidJohnson-tv2nn idunno about that, give them time...they haven't been working on Starship all that long.
@@Steven_Edwards They have been working on it for a couple of years now, and to date the project has been a complete clusterf**k. Hope things change for the better but I don't have a lot of confidence that it will happen.
@@DavidJohnson-tv2nn the real work started last year, after the initial Planing stage was complete. Where should they be by now, in order to satisfy your high criteria for not being a clusterfuck? You think destroying a few welded together tanks and one engine was never in the cards when building a completely new space vehicle? Compared to what is it a clusterfuck really? The Russians who are still on the drawing board with Yrtish/Yenisei? Or maybe SLS? Or blue origin? Do tell, please.
By the way, did you have high confidence about falcon, heavy and crew dragon?
The grid-engine Falcon Heavy reminded me of the CR90...
Falcon 11v
Falcon 9 Air? With that naming scheme we could have had the Falcon 9 Mini, Falcon 9 Air 2 and Falcon 9 Zoom by now...
BFR from composite materials also can be added to this.