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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.
No confirmation yet on explosion, though that sounds probable.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
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." ---
New tweet from Musk, but no new news:
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
Because it has no crew and is remote controlled, with various automated features such as locking to specified GPS coordinates..
I'm not sure why you're confused about this.
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.
It fell over, so clearly the problem is not enough RCS thrusters!
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Please learn the meaning of the word "yet". There was no video of the event at the time, nor anyone on the barge who could have seen it.
You can learn new words in the teacher's lounge.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
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.
The Shuttle SRBs were parachute landings. They landed at nearly highway speeds. It's hard to parachute land a gigantic, fragile object and have it be intact. And seriously, parachutes are way more likely to go offtrack than engine-guided landings.
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.
Smart parachute technology is developing too.
The problem with a rocket fuel explosion is that its detonation could burn out oxygen in an area, and there could be as a result unpredictable pressure fluctuations, which could hurt humans. Let alone the risk of starting a fire. Obviously, for a landing they keep quite an amount of fuel in reserve. It is impossible to land an aircraft with zero fuel exactly.
In my opinion, it is safer to burn all the fuel high in the air and use the abundant clean energy of gravity for landing.
Slow means big parachutes.
Big parachutes means heavy.
Heavy on a first stage means "no payload fraction to orbit".
A rocket explosion will not "burn out oxygen in an area"; rockets have their own oxidizer, in roughly stoichometric ratios with their fuel.
You cannot burn 100% of your propellant, the tanks do not completely drain.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
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?
It is impossible to land an aircraft with zero fuel exactly.
Sadly enough, pilots continue to do so - with all-too-often fatal results.