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Longer Video Shows How Incredibly Close Falcon Stage Came To Successful Landing
Bruce Perens writes In the video here, the Falcon 9 first stage is shown landing with a tilt, and then a thruster keeps the rocket vertical on the barge for a few seconds before it quits, followed by Kabooom with obvious significant damage to the barge. It looks like this attempt was incredibly close to success. Given fixes, a successful first-stage recovery seems likely.
It sure seems that if a larger landing area was available, so that the rocket didn't have to lean so far to adjust to a very small target and thus could prioritize staying vertical, it would be able to land successfully. What's it going to take for NASA or the FAA or whatever to give them permission to land on, um, land.
Better known as 318230.
Probably not when they figure out how to land on the barge without exploding... at that point the damage from hitting the water and amount of cleaning & service required to be read for launch will be much more.
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You can see a lot more if you go to 1080 HD and full screen. There's some large piece of equipment, perhaps the motor head for one of the barge's corner thrusters, being thrust off of the barge in flames.
It looks like they'll need to do a lot of work on the barge. The support ship Go Quest and the tug Elsbeth III seem to be back in Jacksonville according to vessel tracking sites. There is a Carnival cruise ship that parks next to the barge's dock every 4 days, so we will probably see photos from its bow netcam if we don't see them otherwise.
Oh, check out this newscast. At 2:43, CBS News uses a sequence a SpaceX fan produced with Kerbal Space Program to illustrate how the landing is supposed to work.
Bruce Perens.
They have talked about refueling on the barge and flying the booster to land! That's really difficult to do after a salt-water dip :-)
Bruce Perens.
They have a job for you in the ULA marketing department.
Bruce Perens.
Why am I not convinced your way sounds like the "easy way"?
I can't event think of the mechanical stresses involved in opening this thing up to spin it around.
In fact, it sounds outright crazy.
And that's before we start considering a fuel tank designed to open up. Because, what could possibly go wrong there?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Looking at the video, it appears the booster does not come close to ever having anywhere near a true vertical orientation, and this attempt was not, in fact, "incredibly close to success". Granted, it came closer than ever in history to achieving the goal, but the thruster appeared to not have enough thrust to push the rocket to a vertical position once the booster touched down on the barge. I hope Space-X has a successful next test! The world needs a dose of rockets landing on large flames in the style of those old campy movies.
With Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. We've seen what "close" gets us with rocketry, and it's not pretty.
Kindergarten Question for SpaceX: why not simply put the equivalent of a safety net on the barge, cut the rocket's engines at an altitude of ~10m and let the rocket fall safely into the net? Less fuel, less complexity and less cost.
A couple of months ago I was having a discussion with a fellow from Space X who designs the hydraulic systems and we spoke about a number of issues. This was right after the failed landing due to it running out of hydraulic fluid. I asked about how reusable the engines are and he said that they run test burns lasting hours. The launch is only a few minutes. According to what he said, it should just be a simple matter of refueling and adding more hydraulic fluid and probably some other simple things without having to do a major overhaul. The engines are very reliable.
I asked about why they don't reuse the hydraulic fluid and he said that it was cheaper and lighter to not reuse it. He also said that they knew it could run out and that the next version would have more.
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We could start with our already phallic looking rocket and then have it come down into something that looks like the world's largest inflatable sex toy. Elon Musk might have trouble living that one down. :-)
Yes, there have been many proposals to somehow catch the rocket.
Bruce Perens.
Hard to splash down on the moon, Mars, asteroids and just about everywhere else we want to go. We'll have to get it right eventually, might as be now. Bonus benefit: cheaper than overhauling the engines every time. You'd think with them doing this at a third the cost of anyone else, WITH A PROFIT, that people would understand that they know what they're doing. Yes, there will be early failures, but this doesn't add that much cost, especially considering long term payoff.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Musk's claim is that the barge didn't sustain any serious damage.
Screw self-landing boosters. What I want is a house made out of whatever the barge is made of, easily shrugging off what are essentially two direct rocket hits complete with massive explosion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suppose magnetic/sticky harpoons might help (you don't want to damage it after all), sort of like guy-lines on an airship. I don't know about a shock-absorbing landing pad (your catcher's mitt) though - in the moments before landing the backwash would be subjecting it to forces exceeding those of the weight of the rocket itself - probably at least as difficult to tune any "give" to occur at the proper moment as i is to land the sucker in the first place.
Plus, as others have mentioned, Musk seems to have his eye on Mars. Landing a colony ship can probably only be done by rocket, and there won't be any special landing pads on Mars. Plus, for more terrestrial concerns, if he can master landing on a simple barge, he can land pretty much anywhere, which dramatically improves the value of his rocket design onte international market: any bit of flat, stable land is a potential cheap spaceport that his rockets can service.
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fuel needed for the landing is inefficient compared to a splashdown parachute recovery
The barge/ocean is just a temporary measure. The vision is twenty rockets launching a day and returning to the launch site to prep for the next launch.
There were about 120 rocket launches last year. SpaceX's mission statement is to reduce the cost of launches by 100x, and utilization rates go up as costs fall, so it's not just 100x more launches - twenty a day is probably very conservative if they hit their price targets.
Queue the folks who can't imagine what anybody would do with more than 640 launches a year.
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Remember: seawater ruins everything.
You think landing on a body 1/6 of Earth's gravity, without an atmosphere or weather, and under the control of a human is really comparable to landing on Earth, with full gravity, atmospheric weather systems, and all controlled by a computer?
We have Kerbal players now.
Close to where I live are large intertidal mudflats. Every other summer some tourist drives a brand new four by four out there and gets stuck. And then, of course, the tide comes in. When the vehicles are recovered two or three tides later, they are insurance write-offs - the electrics, interior, and engine are all beyond repair.
You do not want to immerse something complex and expensive in salt water unless you really, really have to.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.