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SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches, Rocket Recovery Attempt Scrapped

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.

An anonymous reader writes After scrubbing a launch Sunday because a radar glitch, and canceling one Tuesday due to high winds, SpaceX has successfully launched the Falcon 9 rocket holding the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite. The DSCOVR will orbit between Earth and the sun, observing and providing advanced warning of particles and magnetic fields emitted by the sun. The planned attempt to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket via autonomous drone ship was scrapped due to huge waves in the Atlantic.

4 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Landing Pad by rmdingler · · Score: 3, Informative
    On its face, a land recovery might seem more practical.

    Aside from avoiding cities and attorneys, landing on a barge in the ocean offers a couple of advantages:

    The booster is already out over the ocean after launch from the coast. Redirecting it back to land would increase fuel needs and payload. (Musk says an increase of 15-30%).

    The drone barge is able to move to the booster, an advantage difficult to mimic on land.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  2. Re:What is the purple stuff? by Vulch · · Score: 3, Informative

    The liquid is a camera inside the second stage fuel tank, last launch they were showing it after the engine cut-off and you had large blobs of the stuff floating round inside. The black and white camera appears to be a thermal infra-red looking at the second stage engine nozzle.

  3. Re:What is the purple stuff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Any purpose for the camera other than for watching blobs of fuel float around? Just in case of RUD to see if something happened in the tank?

    Basically, yeah. If you've got no gravity because you're not accelerating, you've got a rather interesting engineering problem if your objective is to drain a liquid from the "bottom" of a tank into a fuel pump when it comes time to light (or shut down and restart) a rocket engine. It's been a mostly-solved problem for decades, but the key word here is "mostly..."

  4. Re:What is the purple stuff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Small solid fuel rockets to create acceleration before main engine ignition.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor