Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Lands Falcon 9 Rocket At Cape Canaveral (planetary.org)
Rei writes: At 8:40 PM today, SpaceX successfully launched and relanded the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, as well as delivering to orbit the last portion of ORBCOMM's communication satellite constellation. This also marks SpaceX's return to flight and the first launch of the "Full Thrust" Falcon 9 v1.1 with densified (extremely chilled) propellants. The company will now shift its efforts toward catching up on its backlog, investigating and refurbishing its landed first stage, and preparing for the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket this spring. Congratulations to everyone at SpaceX!
I actually cheered out loud. I've been a space fan since the shuttle program began. This is great news, and great progress.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
*drinks beer*
How many times can they reuse the rocket?
I wonder how much of this was due to learning from the past misses and updating to version 1.1, and how much was from deciding to land on the ground and not on a barge at sea. Hell, learning from past misses and deciding not to land on a barge might be the same thing.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
nah, am sure musk wouldn't lie.
Hats off to you guys, I was cheering so loud my kids thought something was wrong with me haha.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
That'll teach Blue Origin not to get cocky...
Or not: http://mashable.com/2015/04/30/penis-rocket-bezos/#SRDCQNhZ9SqH
Props to Blue Origin for what they did a few week ago. But, what SpaceX did is one step above and beyond and a game changer. I warned everyone else in my house (I was the only one watching this SpaceX launch) not to worry if I excitedly started yelling and clapping!! Keep doing it again SpaceX!
Everybody knows you wait until the first service pack comes out before launching.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Great job SpaceX! My wife and I kept the kids up to watch and we were cheering like we won the Super Bowl! Awesome!!!
Look, I just made you read my signature.
Sorry, but Bezos beat them to it.
Wow, what a sight to behold. It was pretty hard to stay quiet while watching that streak of light come down with everybody cheering. Probably the first "USA! USA!" chant I've ever heard that was both entirely well-deserved and not even a little bit sarcastic. An historic occasion indeed. :-)
Congratulations SpaceX, this is like that 4th launch where everyone suddenly went from doubt to astonishment.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
With airplanes, a carrier landing is quite a bit more difficult than landing on land. You can land with a stuck rudder OR with a stuck elevator OR you can land on an aircraft carrier. I wouldn't want to try to land on an aircraft carrier with a stuck rudder.
I don't know the details of the SpaceX controls, but I suppose it's possible that a glitch like a stuck valve would be easier to work around with a larger landing zone, and one that's not moving. In theory, with the stuck valve they might have had the option of manipulating the controls differently to land 300 yards away and upright.
"There is no joy like nerd joy!"
America. Love it!
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Better known as 318230.
I've watched it land 4-5 times now and every time it's just as fantastic, I get all giddy inside. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Congratulations to Elon and co. A feat of engineering!
Lets examine the so-called success of Elon Musk. Staked by his father with over a year's salary in startup funds, he sells a questionable website in the early dotcom craze. Next we find him dabbling in another dot-com Millenial no-value concept, from there, moving to government-subsidized electric cars nobody can afford, and now to another guaranteed contract government subsidy program. If this guy's name was "John Jones" and he was American, nobody would give him the time of day. But he's foreign, and has a creepy name, so he's trendy to hang around.
Flush him down the toilet of history.
Given the current corruption and incompetence in DC?
Hopefully it will be one of many such successful launches and recoveries in the year(s) to come, It'll be nice to get some video of day landings as well as while I'm sure a night launch/landing is great for those actually witnessing it on the ground you can't really see much on video. I'm also curious as to how closely to center it landed on its pad, would it have been successful if they had gone for a ocean platform landing or did a larger pad make all the difference.
They fly all around the heavens, and don't find a single trace of GOD. Man, such idiots. HE IS THERE!!!
And congrats to SpaceX, this is a very important step in the right direction!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is one of the more important and positive events of the last many months. Not forgetting Amazon and their earlier landing. Get off the planet or go extinct. Many people in the west think going extinct is the better way. Thankfully, even as a majority, they don't count as much as individuals with a burning vision and will to fly.
1. How Native American lands in Florida were used without permission to
2. Help elites leave the planet to create a poor-free utopia while
3. Destroying the environment as they leave.
Won't SOMEONE think of the children!!
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Can someone explain why NASA with thousands of engineers and decades of experience couldn't or wouldn't do what SapceX did?
I'm sure they could have done this by the 70's if that were their goal. The essentially did the same type of control landing the LEM on the moon (controlled flight of a balanced rocket). In fact it's more difficult to control something short like the LEM where the CP and CM are close together than a long cylinder. At least mathematically, they each have their problems. But they opted for wings which may or may not have been a correct decision based on expected missions.
It seems...scary. But this is bound to happen in all fields with a declining population.
In my opinion such a landing add an unnecessary complexity. The Shuttle program showed that it is impractical.
I think it is just one more attempt to do it differently, not with a parachute, not as it was done originally in 1957 and 1961. Kind of its own, an US way. .
I'm sure they could have done this by the 70's if that were their goal.
I think the thing is that never would have been their goal. I'm not speaking of corruption (nor suggesting anything like it) but the thing with NASA is that their pockets have always been very deep. Thus they kind of just looked at discarding a stage 1 rocket a necessary cost of doing what they do and figured the funding would just be there anyways. The problem though is a high cost means that something is impractical, even if you can do it (such as the moon landing in the 60's.)
This is exactly where the private sector has an advantage: It seeks to become more practical, and it's a good time for the private sector to begin taking over at least when it comes to near earth missions, and I think it's time for governments to begin focusing more on deep space rather than fucking around with ISS.
It appears you've never landed an aircraft. You did mention ome of three major challenges, though.
> The reason that a carrier landing is harder
There are at least three reasons that a carrier landing is harder .
1. The runway has been relocated, so you have no approach landmarks. The first thing is that you actually start lining up for landing many miles from where you intend to touch down. To land in Baltimore, you might learn that you need take a right at Atlantic City, NJ. With a carrier, your turns and altitude changes are never in the same place. This one doesn't apply so much to the rocket.
2. Wave motion (AGL keeps moving). The magic to a smooth landing is to make it so that you reach EXACTLY zero altitude at precisely the same moment when your forward motion puts you at the beginning of the runway, at the same instant that your lateral adjustment, with wind, puts you in the middle of the runway, while at the same instant you have ceased lateral motion against the wind and brought the yaw exactly parallel to the runway, at the same time roll goes to zero, while maintaining proper flare (pitch). In other words, the craft is moving in six dimensions* and you try to hit just the right mark in all six dimensions at precisely the same time. It's awfully tough to hit zero AGL at exactly the right time when the ground is moving up towards you, then down away from you. Too difficult for me to try in real life. SpaceX has had much trouble with this. They had the rocket perfectly vertical, and they were able to reach 0 AGL, but they couldn't do both at the same time - touch down while the vehicle was vertical. It's much easier to do that of zero AGL remains constant, rather than having the ocean move the barge up and down.
3. The landing area is much smaller. Factors 1 and 2 can easily cause the landing to occur 40 feet to far to the right, or 400 feet to far down the runway. An ocean-going landing area isn't big enough to allow any margin of error.
> The reason that a carrier landing is harder is because the runway is shorter. With a vertical landing vehicle, it's a non-issue.
The best way to really understand this is to try landing a model helicopter smoothly. Not a drone that flies itself when you let go of the stick, but an old-fashioned model heli. If you can't try that, imagine a perfect, frictionless air-hockey table - the puck glides absolutely perfectly across the table. The lightest feather touch will send it to the other side of the table because there is no friction. That's hover - there is no friction keeping you in the same spot over the ground. Your job is to position the puck at an exact spot on the table and keep in there by tossing pebbles at it.
For anyone that read that and was confused by "moving in six dimensions", consider that an aircraft can MOVE to the left, it LEAN to the left, or it can be POINTED to the left. Aircraft don't have tires in contact with the ground, so with a crosswind you can be pointing to the left while moving to the right. It can GO up or it can POINT up. So the six dimensions of movement are:
X
Y
Z
Yaw
Pitch
Roll
A destructive test means something like cutting the finished part open, chemically etching the metal and examining it under a magnifying glass. It is simply 'testing that destroys the part, the opposite to non-destructive testing like ultrasound.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
This payload was light enough, and the upgraded F9 grunty enough, that it could do it, but larger payloads will require an ocean landing.
A barge landing can use the atmosphere for braking, but that means that you re-enter halfway across the Atlantic. Returning to the launch site takes a honking great boost-back maneuver. The booster accelerated to 6000 km/h (1 mile per second) before staging. While some part of that is vertical and gravity will help, for orbital insertion the majority is lateral, and the booster has to cancel all of that velocity propulsively before it can start backtracking to the launch site.
The fundamental job of a rocket is to supply kinetic energy to a payload. Energy consumed in boost-back is not delivered to the payload.
As Elon Musk explains, return to launch site is much more expensive than return to barge. F9 can deliver 300 GJ of energy to the second stage and return to a barge. Or it can deliver 120 GJ to the second stage and return to the launch site. That's 40%. Return to launch site is throwing away 60% of the booster.
Notice how much they talked about the performance increases. Higher engine thrust, densified LOX to fix more fuel into the first stage, a stretched second stage. Even though the net payload mass is one third of the Dragon capsule on CRS-7.
(Dragon has 6000 kg payload capacity, plus the pressurized capsule and orbital maneuvering system isn't light. 12×172 kg of Orbcomm satellites is 2064 kg, plus a fairing and deployment bus.)
Although it's >90% of the weight, the cost of kerlox rocket fuel is so tiny compared to the rest that it's worth burning more fuel for a higher-probability of recovery. But not all payloads give you that option.
Six degrees of freedom, not six dimensions. Still only the boring old 3 dimensions.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
take a right at Atlantic City, NJ
I'm not putting you in charge of navigation. You're supposed to take a left toin at Albuquerque.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Linux is a complete re-write and many of the contributors live overseas.
This is an irrelevant side conversation. SpaceX's use of Linux is tactical, not strategic, and they could just as easily used many other OS's in place of Linux, so long as they were capable of getting the job done.
Since most of the time is spent in user space running the applications they need the platform to run, and not in the system calls, it's really quite irrelevant what software platform is implementing those system calls, just like the speed, overhead, or number of system calls a second, and other benchmarks on which Linux prides itself, are largely irrelevant.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
To be fair, a Green Card is not the same as being "from the USA" and Elon Musk himself is from South Africa. So it was a bit strange to me too to hear "USA - USA" when SpaceX is really competing mostly with other US companies...
I'm sure they could have done this by the 70's if that were their goal. The essentially did the same type of control landing the LEM on the moon (controlled flight of a balanced rocket). In fact it's more difficult to control something short like the LEM where the CP and CM are close together than a long cylinder.
It's easier to land on the moon than to land on the planet because you only need 1/6 as much vertical thrust, while your orientation rockets still work just as well as ever. I'd think that overall it would still be an easier job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is what I thought the 21st century was going to be like. Rockets taking off and landing again. I can see a passenger version of this in a few years where you can fly from New York to Australia in 30 minutes. The same vertical landing tech can be used to land on Mars. Refuel and return to Earth. Now if we can just perfect flying cars.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
One more step closer to running away from our problems.
It's not so much the controlled vertical landing of the rocket, but that they can re-use the rocket engines so many times. NASA never achieved that, for example the SSMEs effectively needed rebuilding after each flight. What SpaceX seem to be shooting for with this is closer to "put the gas in it, go, repeat" without the rebuild between every flight (which made the Space Shuttle so damned expensive).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Not raining on the parade, but the last two attempts were out in the ocean, so if something went wrong, a very large object with fuel still in it wouldn't fall on someone's minivan on I-95 on the way to grandma's house in Boca Raton.
How come this time around SpaceX had the cajones to return the vehicle to Florida? At the altitude this thing reaches, wouldn't a small ballistic error and motor failure (resulting, say, from a little software error that reboots the controller) send the launcher anywhere from a few feet to multiple miles off target? Like Ft. Lauderdale?
I mean, it's fuck crazy cool what just happened, truly, but I sure hope it's got old-fashioned parachutes as a backup before it lands by accident in a retirement community, because the plan is to launch and land a lot more of them and something is bound to go a little wack.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Yes, but often refered to as "6 axis" (not dims) X,Y,Z and A,B,C - Common (well semi) in CNC machining - well, X,Y,Z is default, and you'll see a lot of A (4th Axis) work. Beyond that, you tend to get strange machines
Six degrees of freedom, not six dimensions. Still only the boring old 3 dimensions.
Wrong. Angles and even speeds of rotation are dimensions too. It's a quantification that you can't do the task without? Check. You can measure and assign a value to it? Check. You can compare that value to what you want and do something that changes that value in some predictable way? Check. It's a dimension. Flatness, roundness, co-axialness... I could go on. Geometric tolerances are a big part of what makes the modern world what it is rather than what it was 50 years ago. But you think X, Y, and Z are it. In fact, you think it strongly enough to try and correct somebody that was giving an explanation of a difficult task. Too bad all you did was look foolish.
A simple 3D printer considers temperature and filament feed rate as distinct dimensions also. I program 9-axis milling machines, and as long as people like you fail to understand more than 3 dimensions, I have better job security. No skin off my nose.
And thanks, raymorris, for your interesting comment. You lost me a bit on the air hockey part. Wouldn't it be more like the puck trying to keep itself in place by tossing pebbles away, until it ran out of pebbles? ;-)
The essentially did the same type of control landing the LEM on the moon (controlled flight of a balanced rocket). In fact it's more difficult to control something short like the LEM where the CP and CM are close together than a long cylinder. At least mathematically, they each have their problems. But they opted for wings which may or may not have been a correct decision based on expected missions.
Isn't the CP irrelevant for the LEM, landing on airless Luna?
NASA never achieved that
But they never really tried that either. AFAIK, the SSME are the most complex engines, of any type, ever made and also the most efficient. Performance was their goal, not reuseability.
Yes. There is economic disincentive to reuseability if you are a manufacturer. Why build one rocket when you can build 20?
Did anyone else notice that "Mission Control" was made up of 20-somethings in jeans and T shirts, compared to NASA's Apollo Mission Control consisting of older, all male, suit and tie wearing team?
Umm, maybe not. Even if your maneuvering thrusters can provide a lot more thrust with that tall moment arm, dynamic stability is much lower. It's like trying to balance a pencil on the eraser as compared to balancing just the eraser.
Plus there's the fact that you're operating under lunar gravity, which is 1/6th that of Earth. That buys you roughly six times as long to correct any thrust imbalances - essentially everything is moving at 1/6th speed compared to an Earth landing. Which is a big deal considering the actual landing was done under direct human control because software of the era wasn't up to the challenge. You just can't overclock humans to deal with things that much more rapidly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They could also have chanted "Deutschland" "Deutschland", because almost all basic technologies of SpaceX were developed by the Wehrmacht. The great American space pioneers were Wehrmacht personell before.
What SpaceX does is to slightly modernize and to add the first-stage landing technology.
The same can be said about Russian spaceflight - they captured the other half of von Braun's team.
Oh yeah. Communist shittalking.
Here is the news: Your poor suppressed friends in Africa multiply like crazy and will consume hundreds of times more resources than those couple of rockets.
Exponential growth of humanity is the Elefant In the Room, which must be addressed.
Send them sacks of condoms.
It all has to do with gain margins (from control theory) and not gravity or moment arms. To be sable (controllable), the center of mass has to be ahead of the center of pressure. The problem with the lem is than it's squat with a heavy bottom and not a lot of high up mass. There was only 15" between the two.
NASA never achieved that
But they never really tried that either. AFAIK, the SSME are the most complex engines, of any type, ever made and also the most efficient. Performance was their goal, not reuseability.
That Nasa never attempted to develop cheap & reliable engines/launch systems, preferring to tweak & complexify everything is damning in and of itself.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
If you cannot see how the V2 developed all the BASIC technologies which are used in liquid fuel rockets to the present day, you are simply an idiot who should stay clear of engineering.
The Ariane, the Russian civilian launchers, Saturn and also SpaceX are just scaled-up+multistage versions of the V2 engine. All of them trace back to Peenemünde. The V2 already reached outer space and only because Hitler forbid it, they did not launch satellites. The Russkies did, so that they could outdo America propaganda-wise.
The only space launcher which cannot be traced to Peenemünde are the solid-fuel weapons like Topol-M, Polaris and similar. The Japanese try to turn them into sat launchers with little success so far. I guess it is because solid fuel cannot be nicely controlled like the V2-style engines. And that means imperfect satellite orbit.
And even the solid-fuel missiles were largely developed in Germany as early air defence weapons.
But of course all that is based on very early Chinese work on rather small solid-fuel missiles.
Vertical integration. Why build 20 rockets when you can charge 20 times for the same one? Profit!
How far apart is the landing pad from the launch pad? The only information I've been able to find is that they are both at Cape Canaveral.
...if they were, there could be no boost-back burn.
(But I get your meaning; they are nearly empty.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"I’m nauseatingly pro-American. It is where great things are possible."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
estimates for the amortized cost has been as high as $5 billion/launch. When you compare that to SpaceX's fixed $60-130 million per launch that also covers their R&D expenses it's a bargain.
Given facts like this, how does anyone claim with a straight face that government can do things about as efficiently as private-sector efforts can?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
So after seeing the video, I thought, why not?
While not an astonishing success like SpaceX's (I am after all only one man with a dual core laptop or six, they have hundreds if not thousands of brains and supercomputers pouring out their wazoos), I did manage a water landing AND put a payload into orbit. Photo op here.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
How much effect does the CP have in vacuum?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes. There is economic disincentive to reuseability if you are a manufacturer. Why build one rocket when you can build 20?
There is if you're the only manufacturer. But what if your competitor starts offering a lower price? Well then you might want to find some ways to lower your own costs so that you can offer an even lower price. This is actually one of the wonderful things about capitalism is that it encourages people to find more practical ways of doing things.
And believe it or not, SpaceX does in fact have multiple competitors, though most of them aren't private sector, rather they're foreign governments (i.e. Russia, India.)
It's too bad you can't buy stocks in SpaceX right now. I'd like to invest everything I own toward their new success. It'll be te staple for space cargo.