Parts of Falcon 9 Launcher Wash Ashore In England (bbc.co.uk)

RockDoctor writes with news as reported by the BBC that parts of a Falcon 9 launcher have washed ashore on the Isles of Scilly off the SW coast of Britain. Early impressions are that the pieces are from the failed Falcon 9 ISS launch which exploded after take-off in June. That's not the only possibility, though; according to the article, However Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said many experts believed, due to the size and markings which have now been revealed, it was from a different mission. "All the geeks have been getting together and looking at fine details, and we're pretty sure it's a launch from September 2014 that successfully sent a cargo mission to the space station. "It didn't look like an exploded rocket to me, it looked like a fairly normal piece of space junk when the lower stage of a rocket falls from a hundred miles up and hits the ocean. Large sections can remain in tact and it's really quite normal," he said.

Comments

And a dupe was washed ashore on slashdot

[dunkelfalke]

How very unusual.

Re:And a dupe was washed ashore on slashdot

[RockDoctor]

If it's a dupe, it wasn't showing up when I submitted it. And indeed the other one was posted at the same time that I was composing mine and checking for dupes. So blame the Slashdot "editors" and/ or system, not me. I did my due diligence.

Parts of the integrated face system wash ashore

[Anonymous Coward]

The Integrated Face System, which was sent into space, fell down and parts were found near England.

What?

[Hognoxious]

Large sections can remain in tact

Are the small ones more inclined to be blunt?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The opposite of "in tact" is "tactless", not "blunt".

Re:What?

[Hognoxious]

Wrong.

http://www.thesaurus.com/brows...

P.S. Whooooooosh.

Pick one...

[Anonymous Coward]

So is it Britain or England? I'ts not 'rocket science' guys.

Re:Pick one...

[Anonymous Coward]

One's a subset of the other. :-)

Now if you said England while talking about, say, Aberdeen, then that's a different matter...

Re:Pick one...

[Dogtanian]

So is it Britain or England? I'ts not 'rocket science' guys.

As the other guy said, Britain or England are both correct, since England is a part of Britain and despite their position quite some distance from the mainland, the Scilly Isles are still considered part of England.

As a nationalistic Scot, I dislike when "England" and "Britain" are used interchangeably, and the headline/summary discrepancy does smack of that being the reason- however, since it was still technically correct I wasn't going to make a deal of it until you made that comment.

(You can stop reading here if you don't want a confusingly-detailed breakdown of the various terms. Just at least do me a favour as long as I have to remain technically British and don't assume "English" and "British" are synonyms! )

FWIW, if one wants to start nitpicking, the term "Britain" on its own isn't really well-enough defined in modern usage to argue over- beyond the fact it definitely *isn't* synonymous with "England". Generally "Britain" tends to be used even by people here as synonymous with the political state of the United Kingdom (i.e. the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"). "Great Britain" is the geographic term for the main island including Scotland, England and Wales, but not Northern Ireland, hence the full name of the UK. Meanwhile, the "British Isles"- a geographic term- includes the island of Ireland (part of which is of course an entirely independent country), along with some others such as the Isle of Man and the aforementioned Scilly Isles. (Some people in the Irish Republic dislike the term "British Isles", which is understandable given the use of "British" above).

What's really going to bake your noodle is that whereas the Scilly Isles are considered part of England, the Isle of Man, despite being a British crown dependency roughly the same distance from the mainland, isn't even technically a part of the United Kingdom itself... :-/

Actually, now that I've looked into it, the Channel Islands (i.e. Guernsey and Jersey) are also considered a part of the "British Isles"- a nominally geographic term- despite the fact they're far closer to- and more obviously associated with- France. One might suspect they were only counted as part of the "British Isles" for political reasons, since they're British crown dependencies, albeit not a part of the UK itself (like the Isle of Man).

Re:Pick one...

[unimacs]

Thanks for clearing that up. I understand that Isle Royal in Lake Superior is technically part of the British Isles even though it much closer to Minnesota than mainland Michigan.

'not the only possibility'

[queazocotal]

= certainly not correct.
It's CRS4 - the fourth launch to ISS.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c...

The logo wasn't painted quite the same each time, and is very clear from the part.

Re: 'not the only possibility'

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The reddit poster claims the debris logo goes slightly beyond the 'o'.
1a. He doesn't show any photo of the debris showing any such thing.
2. Reddit poster shows three photos and claims 3rd is the only one with red past the 'o'.
2a. His 3 photos don't show any such thing.

It's a ripped off piece of metal, with Falcon 9 written on it. It clearly did not re-enter the atmosphere since it is unburned, it fell from much lower. It is explosion debris.
Showing photos and seeing things that aren't there is dilusional or Elon astroturf.

Re: 'not the only possibility'

[Teancum]

It would help to read the actual thread where the process of elimination took place rather than the NSF forum thread which was after it was already hashed out. The discussion also took place on IRC, but it also involved evidence that went well beyond just the photos, including automatically eliminating all launches from Vandenberg and then trying to perform some ocean current analysis to try and figure out how long it would take for ocean currents to push rocket debris from between Florida and Bermuda to make its way to the British Isles.

It is explosion debris.

No, it is not necessarily explosion debris. This particular section appears to be from the interstage section between the upper and lower stages of the Falcon 9, which is jettisoned and left to fall on its own to wherever it might land after the two stages separate. The lower stage breaks off first and then this part is an extra shroud used to make the area around the upper stage engine aerodynamically efficient when the lower stage is firing.

Another interstage section has been recovered earlier from yet another flight. The only thing really remarkable here is that it was covered in barnacles... something that even people who run ship across the Atlantic hardly find remarkable either other than it also indicates a bit of the length of time that it spent in the water.... that can also be used to help determine which flight this likely came from.

While it is I suppose possible that it was the CRS-7 flight and the explosion from that like you seem to indicate, there are many reasons to suggest this panel was not from that flight.

Re: 'not the only possibility'

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Who cares about claims when you have photos?
1a. See 1.
2. Yes.
2a. They do, are you blind? Protip: click on the link below the thumbnail to see the full size image.

And much more conclusive - compare the location of the piece of hardware between/above o and n. On CRS7 it was centered horizontally between them, on CRS4 it was over the left edge of the n.

It's a ripped off piece of metal

Yeah, this looks totally like metal...

It clearly did not re-enter the atmosphere since it is unburned, it fell from much lower.

No, it didn't re-enter the atmosphere at orbital velocities. 1st stages (and the interstage that stays attached to the 1st stage on F9) generally don't.

It is explosion debris.

Wow, just look at the sheer amount of evidence you provide for that claim...

Showing photos and seeing things that aren't there is dilusional or Elon astroturf.

I'll take photos over "it's explosion debris because I say so" any day.

It's not burned, it didn't fall

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely, the flag and words 'Falcon 9' are not even scorched, so it didn't fall through the atmosphere 100 miles up. It was clearly ejected lower down and therefore from the explosion.

It is confirmed to be a bit off CRS-4 Falcon 9

[Anonymous Coward]

BBC originally got it wrong and same shit is being repeated elsewhere. CRS-7 booster went to bits and probably nothing this big survived, besides the interstage had grid fins. This one doesn't have them.

The interstage has been identified as part of Falcon 9 that launched CRS-4 to the ISS in September 2014. That booster did a soft landing to the ocean as part of the re-use tests. It then tipped over and broke up, so it would make sense that a part of the interstage could survive that and being a composite honeycomb bit, it floats.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falcon_9_updates/ ..for the gory details how it was identified. TLDR: The beak of the falcon logo is slightly offset vs any other booster that is missing the grid fins that could fit this debris.

Meta: Removing Reddit Links from /. posts?

[Teancum]

I posted a link to the actual thread in Reddit (on the SpaceX subreddit) where the discussion too place, and Slashdot stripped out the link. Is this now normal?

It is CRS-4, which soft-landed in the ocean.

[robbak]

The mission this piece came off was CRS-4. This mission was one of the first missions where recovery experiments were done.

After separating from the second stage and payload, this first stage was spun around, the engines re-lit to slow the rocket down and allow it to re-enter the atmosphere on one piece. It then fell through the atmosphere, before the engines re-lit a third time to slow it down, and it splashed down at slow speed. At this point, the stage would have fallen over, and the pressurized tanks would have burst.

A good run down of the landing attempts are on a page in the reddit spacex wiki at www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/dev

They identified that this was from this stage by eliminating all others.

It wasn't from the rocket that exploded, because that rocket had grid fins added, and the location where these fins would have been is on this piece of debris. In addition, not enough time has passed for debris from that event to have reached the Isles of Scilly. This also rules out any recent launch, for the same two reasons. It would also be assumed that the destruction of CRS-7 would have caused more damage to this piece than we see.

Of the other launches, they ruled out early ones because the designs of the flag and logo didn't match, and that they would have been destroyed by reentry as you said. That left about 5.

They then compared images of the rockets on the launch pad with the images of this debris. The locations of items (lumps and bumps, basically) on the interstage only matched for one launcher: the launcher for CRS-4.

Once this was confirmed, it matched with a serial number located on the stage. Earlier this year, a piece of the fairing from another launch was found washed up in the Caribbean. It had a similar serial number on it. SpaceX quickly confirmed what launch it was from, and it was noted that the 'core number', that is, sort of the serial number for the whole rocket, was embedded in a particular place in that part's serial number. In the same place in this piece's serial number was the correct core number for CRS-4. So they had their answer. All we are waiting for is SpaceX's confirmation, which should come in the next few days.

Scilly Islands?

[Zoxed]

Peter Pedant calling: there is no such location as "Scilly Islands" - you probably mean "The Isles of Scilly"? (per the linked to page!).