Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

SpaceX Successfully Launches Jason-3 Satellite, Rocket Landing Partial Success (theverge.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the win-some-and-lose-some dept.

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).

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's really too soon for this post. by rasmusbr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The live stream froze just as a yellow reflection (rocket exhaust most likely) became visible on the surface of the ship, which probably means that the rocket was no more than 50 meters or so from the ship at that time. So it seems plausible that it hit the ship. I imagine SpaceX has recovered footage from the ship by now unless the antenna got hit by debris from the explosion.

    The fuel and the tank is quite fragile and at least one of the engines is extremely hot and located near the fuel tank, so unless the landing is perfect the tank will burst and the fuel will ignite. I expect we'll see some fiery footage within a day or two once they've had time to analyse it internally.

  2. Re:It's really too soon for this post. by mobby_6kl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is why I think that barge landing is pointless, unless it is on a nice still lake, or the barge is 100 percent stabilized. If teh barge is lifting, it can land too hard. If sinking it might be a little better. Just seems like an un-needed complication

    Well they aren't doing it just for shits and giggles - landing on the barge requires significantly less fuel than returning all the way to the launch site. This, turn, reduces the payload capacity and increases the cost per kg.

    I do wonder how feasible it would be to build some sort of a hydraulically stabilized landing platform on top of the barge - not only could it compensate for the shitty weather, but also soften the landing if it detected the rocket coming in too fast.