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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
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.
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?
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.
If you'd been paying attention... There was a live video feed of the attempt. Here's a recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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!"
I've watched it land 4-5 times now and every time it's just as fantastic, I get all giddy inside. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually SpaceX's Grasshopper accomplished what Blue Origin only just did back in 2013. Try again.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Yes, and if you read about that, you'd see some of Blue Origin's personnel came from that project. So Bezos only just did the same thing his people were capable of 20 years ago.
Musk's SpaceX just put a rocket into orbit, delivered a payload, and brought it back down safely. That's never been done before. That's an order of magnitude more difficult than what we've been discussing. This is the biggest advancement in space flight since the first shuttle landed.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Bezos's launcher only reaches 62km altitude, at mach 3. It's less than half the height of Falcon 9 stage 1. It does not do a gravity turn due to the fact that it doesn't get to orbit. All of these make sticking a landing much much easier. If you want Space X to just go up, back down, and land it (like bezos did), then look at 2013, when they did that. Now they've also beaten Bezos to landing the launcher for an orbital space craft.
Note, things like the launcher being twice as tall as Bezos' isn't a case of "well, Space X made a poor design choice to make it that tall"... Instead, it's a case of "if you want to reach orbit, you need low drag, so you need a long thin space craft".
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!!
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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.
NASA is a contracting organization, not an engineering and production organization. Rockets, space probes, they contract them out to private companies. That has been true since the moon landing days. Their new SLS is being designed and built by Boeing, ULA, and Rocketdyne.
In that way NASA "can do" whatever they pay other people to do, so they could do this if they wanted to just by contracting out to SpaceX to do it for them.
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.
If your goal is reducing launch costs, it's hardly unnecessary.
The shuttle program showed that the shuttle was impractical. A large part of that impracticality was due to Congressional meddling.
A rocket that either burns up or lands in the water is a rocket that is no longer reusable.
The US already has a reliable launch vehicle called the X37-B. It can reach orbit (...) The US is also developing the Space Launch System (SLS). (...) Why waste money and resources on rockets whose sole purpose is to launch satellites into orbit or play taxi for the ISS?
Not sure if troll or serious, but since your posting history looks rather sincere... The X37-B is not a launch vehicle, it launches on top of an Atlas rocket. As for the SLS program it will cost $20-35 billion to fully develop and hideously expensive to launch, just throwing away four RD-25 engines will cost around $900 million alone. Given the extremely few launches that are planned, 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.
When the Falcon Heavy launches you get 70% of a SLS Block 1 for a small fraction of the cost and you can assemble 50+ ton modules in LEO if you need to. Like you could launch the whole Apollo mission (CSM+LEM) in one go, then add engines, then add fuel and break orbit for TLI. Looking at delta-v charts there doesn't seem to be any significant penalty for doing so and docking in space we've done many, many times now with the ISS. The only downside is if you genuinely need an even larger monolithic module due to structural integrity or something.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
Six degrees of freedom, not six dimensions. Still only the boring old 3 dimensions.
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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.
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...
Not really splitting hairs. Both the Shuttle and Falcon 9 discard and lose a good part of their spacecraft - the Shuttle loses the whole (huge) LF tank, F9 loses the whole (big and pretty complex) second stage. Apples to apples, Falcon 9 loses more, "percentage-wise".
The real difference though is in cost of refurbishing of what is recovered.
Refurbishing the shuttle and preparing it for a launch (800mln) costs about 10x more than building the Falcon 9, both stages, from scratch (80mln)!
And then recovery of Falcon 9 first stage about halves these costs.
So, the real difference isn't really in what, how much is recovered, how it flies and lands. The real difference is the absolutely vast reduction of costs. 80mln was already something very competetive. Halving it is a total game-changer!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
> 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.
I think not. The flexibility of the full "stack" with Linux allows freer modification of many core principles, with a broader range of drivers and alternative technological approaches for similar projects. MacOS would not run on the wide variety of hardware nor is it well supported for micro-instances, nor does it provide access to the same range of hardware CAD tools. Neither do any of the BSD UNIX releases, such as OpenBSD, nor do the registered and proprietary UNIX vresions like AIX.
The shuttle program has nothing to do with this... virtually every design decision for the shuttle was different from the falcon 9.
The shuttle carried a huge non-reusable external fuel tank and the SRBs (which produced 70% of takeoff thrust) were also non-reusable. The 'main' engines were not really designed for re-use and had to be completely rebuilt after each flight. The decision to use heat tiles instead of an ablative coating meant the risk of heat tiles falling off and required very expensive refurb after each flight. The weird shape of the shuttle meant that the aerodynamics were complicated and hard to understand; Columbia was destroyed partly due to aerodynamic forces. There was no escape system in the event of failure. Much of the design was literally based on "let's get the initial program cost down so that it can be approved by congress and let people pay for our mistakes later."
The shuttle proved zip about re-usable spacecraft. It did, however, prove just how much can go wrong when you have a flawed design process based on impossible and conflicting design requirements and a manufacturing process based on pork and congressional approval.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.