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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.

7 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Different now by jklovanc · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Different now by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

      When I first came here, this was all just ocean. Everyone said I was daft to build a landing platform in the ocean but I built in all the same, just to show them. It blew up. So I built a second one. That sank and blew up.. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the ocean. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest landing barge in all of the Atlantic ocean.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  2. 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

  3. Re:First Stage splashdown where ? by jordanjay29 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. Re:Landing Pad by smaddox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Those are some rough seas by Dereck1701 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...