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SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket On A Floating Drone Ship Again (theverge.com)
Early Friday morning, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea for the second time. The company has recovered the post-launch vehicle a total of three times, two of which involved the rocket landing on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Before the launch, the landing was deemed unlikely as the rocket would be "subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating" in its attempt to launch a Japanese communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit high above Earth. Elon Musk tweeted: "Rocket reentry is a lot faster and hotter than last time, so odds of making it are maybe even, but we should learn a lot either way." As a result of the successful mission, Musk followed up with, "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar." The first successful launch was in December, when the rocket landed at a ground-based spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The second landing occurred in April on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Landing a first stage after a ballistic re-entry is a pretty big deal. This means that SpaceX can recover the first stage in low-remaining-fuel situations like heavy payloads, geostationary injection (because it's a higher orbit) and when the booster is the center stage of a Falcon Heavy (and is really high and far downrange).
Since they've recovered 9 out of 10 engines, they've recovered most of the cost of both stages. If they can get a high recovery rate (and this more-difficult recovery argues that they might), that drives down the cost of a launch.
People at ULA watched this one and it sure wasn't good news for them. They can't compete financially with SpaceX as an expended rocket, forget about their competing with working first-stage recovery. It also blows the ULA recovery strategy - ejecting the engines and recovering just them, instead of the entire booster - out of the water.
But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit. SpaceX wanted to reach a cadence of 18 launches this year, and they have so far launched 4 in the first third of the year. To be a profitable company and to reap the economic advantage of first-stage recovery, they will need to get higher than 18 per year.
So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.
Bruce Perens.
We don't know what was burning down there. It might just have been fuel seeping out of the turbopump. They did a 3-rocket burn this time, and the other two times we've seen a 1-rocket burn.
It's got a much larger fire on the way up. I agree it was alarming, but we don't know that it represented actual damage yet.
Bruce Perens.
There's a lot of water dumped on the pad at launch, and I'm sure some of it splashes on to the bells.
I don't think they are worried about pushing it sideways, the word from Musk is that they don't really have to tie the rocket down once it's landed, and winds and rocking on something 160 feet high are probably more force than that water stream. The rocket is very bottom-heavy with the tanks empty.
When they turned the water on, the nozzle was tilted upward. It wasn't aimed at where the flame was. So it's not too clear what was going on, but I agree that nozzle looked like it was commanded or the result of some sort of fire alarm.
Bruce Perens.
I had an office across the hall from Steve at Pixar for some years. I wasn't that important, maybe they just wanted to keep an eye on me. One day, he made his peace with Bill Gates, and sometime that day I looked up and the NeXT workstation wasn't on his desk any longer. There was a Windows laptop there.
Maybe Elon will get that sort of rude awakening sometime.
Bruce Perens.
I recall that back in the 1990s Bill Gates wanted to build a satellite based cell network. It failed partially due go launch costs. The joking image showed Bill tossing satellites up by jumping on a springboard. More immediately, we need more weather satellites to improve weather forecasting, to keep GPS working, and better communication to far flung places. I recall possibilities of better balanced high speed bearings made in space, balanced better due to microgravity, so cheap launches could spur that. Long term, Musk wants to colonize Mars, and further. He's making the space elevator look less necessary after all.
Part of that effort to build the satellite network resulted in the Iridium satellite constellation. A combination of 1990's electronic technology (it wasn't all that good... really) along with as you said the extremely high launch costs caused the companies to go bankrupt. Iridium itself has gone through several sets of owners, and it was kept on life support financially basically because the U.S. military couldn't find any alternative that could provide global coverage like Iridium was doing.
To give an example of the technical capabilities of Iridium, the first generation had a data throughput speed of 2400 baud for individual customers. That might have been sufficient for reading a few e-mails in the 1990's, but is grossly slow for current needs. The costs for Iridium phones are also insanely expensive compared to what was promised.... and frankly the satellites couldn't handle the crush of millions of users in that first generation either to spread those costs around.
Bill Gates' plan to have a large number of cheap satellites might have worked, but as you have pointed out it needed cheap launch costs to make it possible. $10k/kg to orbit is not cheap.