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SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches, Rocket Recovery Attempt Scrapped
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.
They never live-cast the landing right now, mostly to maintain their PR image. Their Twitter page does a decent job of maintaining updates about the rocket status https://twitter.com/spacex
Too bad the ocean isn't enjoying the same, balmy weather.
Landing on a barge is just a bit safer if something decides to go nuts.
More complicated, but if I lived in the neighbourhood of that Air Force launch pad, my insurance premiums might go up.
The original plan was to move to a landing pad on terra firma after demonstrating it at sea (presumably to reduce potential hazards during testing)
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I'll be mighty surprised if you live at Cape Canaveral.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
First-stage boosters normally just slam into the Atlantic and sink.
Now they bounce off a barge, explode, slam into the ocean and sink. Such an improvement.
And now Musk can relocate it to Baja and set up his secret lair on it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You should use quotes around text copy-and-pasted from an article to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. Also off-topic.
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.
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And we will see landings once the method is perfected. We've already seen videos of past failed landings, simply not live. Sometimes this is because the video feed has to be retrieved manually from the hardware or because they simply don't wish to show an unpredictable video and damage their market worth. SpaceX might not be publicly traded, but they do have investors who might balk at such a public failure. Waiting to release the video with the right spin helps allay fears and lets SpaceX control the message, instead of letting the Internet write the headlines.
Earth-Sun L1 might be kinda hard to peer at, but SOHO is supposed to be parked there
Here is a list of published launches to Lagrange points
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Landing on a barge is just a bit safer if something decides to go nuts.
More complicated, but if I lived in the neighbourhood of that Air Force launch pad, my insurance premiums might go up.
No more than if it were already an active launch pad, I'd guess.
Rockets have a self-destruct feature that is used if control is lost and the rocket strays near populated areas. It could be used on the way down just as well as on the way up.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Anyone who watched the launch video...what is the purple water looking stuff that the camera switched to a couple times? Example at T+00:07:06
That and the black and white shot like at T+:00:09:08...not sure what I'm looking at, the actual sat still covered or something?
The difference is you know a launching rocket is definitely going to be at the launch pad.
If a landing rocket say misses by 10km whilst coming down, it is going to make a big mess.
A launching rocket could perhaps launch and then veer off back towards the ground but it is less likely to occur and can be killed a lot faster.
Maybe he got turned into a newt.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But at all times you know where the rocket is, and can calculate where it might end up, based on various contingencies. If data shows that it might miss the landing point by 10 km, there's plenty of time to push the Big Red Button before it threatens anything on the ground.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I think this demonstrates that the disadvantages likely outweigh the advantages, on average. If launches require optimal weather in two distant locations, it's going to be a lot harder to get rockets off the pad. Once stage recovery is working, I suspect it will be a lot cheaper to increase the fuel by 15-30% than to scrap a sizable fraction of launches.
Of course they don't necessarily have to pick one. They could default to using an ocean landing when weather in the atlantic is optimal (and thus load less fuel), or a land landing when weather in the atlantic is less ideal. Whether or not such a last-minute decision could realistic work is beyond my knowledge.
I initially wondered "if the weathers so bad how did they ocean land it" then I stumbled across some of the ocean wave height maps. Apparently there is a LARGE area of ~20 ft seas off of most of the eastern sea board. You have to go a third of the way to Africa in order to get out of it. While I am sure that the rocket could get that far in no time at all I'd wager the barge is a bit slower.
http://www.wunderground.com/MA...
http://www.oceanweather.com/da...
The amount of fuel that is loaded into the rocket is constrained by the rocket size. So the only practical way to get that extra 30% fuel is to decrease the size of the payload. And that won't happen at the last minute. (Remember that the fuel cost is almost nothing compared to the rocket cost).
How much does the Air Force spend on precision munitions - millions of dollars per bomb, right?
So now - when you do a launch, allow the Air Force to pay you to bring that discarded booster back down on a desired target. If they can direct the booster to a small platform, they can easily bring it down on top of an enemy military installation of choice. Then you don't even have to worry about a delicate landing because you want the opposite.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Waves in the ocean. That sure came out of left field. How could we have predicted that? We have the best experts money can buy making our plans, but how can we succeed when all this weird unpredictable stuff happens to us? /sarc
When the Air Force says, "You can land anywhere you want, except you can't land here, and you can't land here until you land somewhere else," you build a barge and take your chances with the waves.
Yes. The reason this might seem unusual to some people is that civilian space launches in this country have always been openly covered, success or failure. Nobody has seen a need to "control the message" until now, and I'm surprised NASA lets them. It probably didn't occur to them at contract award time, corporate PR behavior being something they haven't had to put up with much before.
Rather disgusting the depths we've sunk to in my opinion.
Asking serious question as I don't have personal experience with it, does ULA or Boeing show the entirety of their launches? Including landing for return vehicles?
Landing on a barge (or ASDS) would still be needed for deep space missions like DSCOVR which didn't have enough fuel left to boost back the stage towards launch pad. The center core of Falcon 9 Heavy wouldn't have enough fuel as well, and will most likely land on ASDS, while other two booster cores go back to landing pad.
SpaceX is in fact building a second ASDS which will be used for launches from Pacific coast.
Still, even in the case of a barge landing, it could potentially be just a "basic inspection and refuel" stop before flyback to the shore, where any more serious maintenance would be done and the craft prepared for its next space launch. The engines are fully restart capable, after all, and the burn time would be relatively low.
"That girl is a witch!" "Yeah, but she's our witch. So cut her the hell down!"
It didn't launch. What's with the totally wrong headline?
SpaceX just recently signed a lease agreement with the Air Force to construct a landing pad for just that purpose. If you have a chance to read through the whole proposal, it's quite interesting. They are using an old launch complex that hasn't been used in 30+ years.
http://spacenews.com/spacex-le...
Link to PDF providing some detail used for the proposal: http://www.patrick.af.mil/shar...
root@allevil:~#
SpaceX just recently signed a lease agreement with the Air Force to construct a landing pad for just that purpose. If you have a chance to read through the whole proposal, it's quite interesting. They are using an old launch complex that hasn't been used in 30+ years.
http://spacenews.com/spacex-le...
Link to PDF providing some detail used for the proposal: http://www.patrick.af.mil/shar...
Here's the PDF for the environmental assessment:
http://www.patrick.af.mil/shar...
root@allevil:~#
True, you can't suddenly decide to touchdown on land unless you have a small payload to begin with, but if there's any doubt as to the viability you could always get the barge in place to have a water touchdown as a last-minute option - no need to decide where you're going to land until after the second stage has detached.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Brilliant. We should just grown one out east of Florida somewhere.
Seriously - I don't think there are any islands anywhere remotely suitable that aren't already populated. I suppose they could try to buy one of the Florida Keys, but that would get expensive...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You really think SpaceX invented the "smart bomb"? In other words, a guided missile?
Of course not. The returning booster would be just like any other guided missile as far as how it reached the target.
I'm just saying, they are looking to recover the booster because of how much it costs - but what if you could recover the costs in other ways rather than re-use of the module...
Other ideas include drifting it across the sky to spell an advertisers name in smoke at high altitude, or to land it at childrens' birthday parties for show.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley