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SpaceX Successfully Launches Jason-3 Satellite, Rocket Landing Partial Success (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket today carrying the Jason-3 ocean monitoring satellite. "Jason-3 data will be used for monitoring global sea level rise, researching human impacts on oceans, aiding prediction of hurricane intensity, and operational marine navigation," NASA said. Unfortunately Space X reports that the attempt to land the Falcon 9 on a drone platform was only a partial success. According to the company twitter page: "First stage on target at droneship but looks like hard landing; broke landing leg."
Update: 01/18 04:16 GMT by S : Here's a brief video of the landing attempt (somewhat loud).
I didn't submit this news because really we barely know anything at the moment. Jason-3 is still awaiting its second burn, and without knowing anything more than "it has a broken leg" I think it's too soon to call the landing a "partial success". The second burn will be happening shortly, and they said we'd get more data about the landing in a few hours.
Be patient, grasshopper.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
it needs more struts
Jason-3 deployed successfully - Rocket broke leg on landing and exploded.
The rocket clearly has no sea-legs. ;-)
It's curious though, that the only really successful landing was on land. I always thought it was because it is so much more difficult, getting to land on a small surface, bouncing on the waves, but when I read the actual papers on it on the site of SpaceX itself, it seemed it never had anything to do with it. It were things like: to few fuel, or a computer-glitch that caused a delay in steering, etc.
Yet...once again, it goes wrong on the drone/barge. Are they just extremely unlikely, or IS it actually so much more difficult to do on there, even when they don't give any indication of it themselves?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Musk baby doesn't want the investors to see the fireball than consumed the Falcon 9 and sunk the "Just Read The Instructions" lander.
OOOOOOPPPPPPPPSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!
Ha ha
Space X or someone needs to move to Burns Flat Oklahoma.
Or are we just fellating Musk some more?
New tweet from Musk, but no new news:
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
Oooh, actual news:
Great to have the update. Not so great for whatever people were in charge with making, prepping, and inspecting the legs ;) Unless it was a design flaw.
I guess we have a new question now - why it didn't lock.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
úff....
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
He gets to claim the first to land one on soil, maybe he could try it on water and get bragging rights to water too. Billionaire problems.
4 legs look not very stable. If one leg failed, the rocket would fall. Why not 6 - 8 legs?
Was on Ocean Avenue this morning for today's launch, and although you didn't see the rocket go up this time (too foggy), the thing that made me the happiest was all the 20 year old people out there today (a lot from SpaceX as from their jackets) watching the event also. Ton's more people out there today than an average launch there! I am so glad at least there is a new generation of people who are genuinely interested in space, the development of new space technology, and working for a place which they are interested in. This is so refreshing from the aerospace I've known before...
I note some are saying it makes sense to let return the whole booster/first stage, and that the center of gravity is at the bottom anyway, so it makes sense to go for the whole packet.. but I dispute that.
Purely speaking from an economic standpoint, it would also make sense to do things differently.
One could also just go for the most expensive part, which are the engines and avionics, and, depending on how you manage to retrieve them, it could actually be better. This isn't really all that far-fetched. Arianespace (EU) is thinking exactly that, for a further development of the Ariane 6, after it gets build. It's partially reusable, and it's called Adeline.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for more info.
And since it only would use 2000 kg versus 35000kg with SpaceX (and thus, also effects the usable payload one can get in orbit), there is actually a commercial case to be made for it.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
more legs = more weight and more motors and things to go wrong.
Jet aircraft only have 3 legs even though if any one of them fails to open, it's in serious trouble. Why not 8 legs? Weight, man.
Aircraft builders have solved this problem by making the 3 legs very reliable. They very rarely fail to open. SpaceX just needs better legs.
One of the first things a pilot learns when coming in to land, is to have "3 in the green",
which are the indicator lights for each of the landing gear legs to be down and
locked. If not, you abort the landing.
In this case, abort was not an option ...
If the booster was just sitting on the platform and the sea state was what they are seeing, would the rocket be able to just sit there?
(Cg margins ok? forces on the structures ok? Slosh in the tanks ok? No tiedowns?)
How nimble is the servo loop used to actually set down?
How fast can the barge move in a new direction?
How fast can the servo respond?
Do the legs have any compliance, or are they fixed?
If they are fixed, is one bigger than the rest, so you can touch on it first and then touch more legs?
I still think the boat needs a 6dof capture device to reach out and grab the rocket and smoothly transition to forcefully holding it.
Great job getting this far though.
You need better legs and not more legs, that's what I kept telling my ex-girlfriend, too. That didn't work out too well, though maybe Elon will have more luck.
Here's the video of the landing :https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/
The rocket made a near perfect landing, even better than the last one. It must be so frustrating for SpaceX team to fail because of something like this.
In the last discussion someone wrote that there is almost no fuel inside while it is landing. I see that there is a lot of fuel to explode even after landing.
If it deviates from a course while landing (what a hundred or two of kilometers for such a vehicle) and falls on a densely populated are, the damage may be significant. A parachute landing of an empty parts looks safer to me.
Did she explode too?
I want to congratulate E.M. on the near thing. I see a lot of discussion on whether ./ is full of fanboys or whether the legs are shite.
You are all missing the main point of success: do any of you remember seeing such a rate of launches? Ever?
Who cares if a few of them tip over. Just get better on the next try.
Frustrating, but also not - a leg-lock collet freeze is just dumb engineering. It's clear where the fault lies, the legs are removable for upgrading -- sure, we got a kaboom, but an iterative improvement is easy and quick to apply.
It seems there is no better technology to fly to the Space as the one developed at Baikonur in 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Get over it, and just keep copying what the Great Engineers and Scientists built. It was not patented.
Wow, the leg was the only hangup. They were probably so focused on solving what was assumed by everyone else to be impossible, actually landing a nearly empty rocket stage in a predetermined location, that someone failed to do some basic checks/engineering on the one item that everyone assumed would be no problem, some simple landing legs.
SpaceX is nice enough to not hide their engineering development program from us, but you'll note that they keep driving the point home that these are experimental landings. Neither their core business, nor their customers, require them to work. They have dozens of boosters to try with every year, and they're unmanned - they don't have to get it right every time.
Unfortunately, the only way to truly try out rocket landing.... is to try out rocket landing. It's not like a computer programmer who can just run the program in his test environment numerous times before release, or a car manufacturer who can keep trying out their car systems on private test tracks until the bugs are ironed out. It's not even incremental improvements over earlier rockets in a family that already had most of its bugs worked out in the past. If SpaceX wants to get rocket landing right... they need to land rockets, and learn from that.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
Indeed. Don't like the result of this launch? Just wait a couple weeks. ;)
Seriously, that was a beautiful landing. If that leg had latched that rocket would be being offloaded right now.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
One leg did not lock, she fell over and dented the midsection.
They were less than two meters off, with good vertical speed. The landing didn't fail; the leg did. How is this not a partial success?