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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.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way? I don't think it does.
I'll get modded down because this is an unpopular question to ask. But it needs to be asked. Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming? Can anyone give me a good answer? I'm doubting it.
No you'll be modded down because its an idiotic question to ask, not mention flamebait.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way?
To start with, you would likely not be writing this comment in the first place if it wasn't for space-based assets. While you might be able to say that your actual TCP/IP packet only traveled along a fiber cable, the work of placing that cable inevitably used at least the GPS satellite constellation along with numerous other space-based vehicles. Like it or not, spaceflight has every day impacts upon your life, no matter how disconnected and isolated you might think your life has become. It is what makes the modern civilization function.
As a matter of fact, this particular satellite was a telecommunication satellite that will be broadcasting over the western Pacific Ocean region (aka eastern Asia).
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
It is stuff like this that you even know about global warming. How else do you think a genuinely global monitoring effort measuring temperatures, ocean conditions, sea levels, and other factors are even followed in the first place? This is how resources are being used to help stop such environmental pollution. If you don't know what is happening, you can't stop it from happening in the future.
I promise you that at least some data packets you are going to be using in the future will go across this particular satellite. The world is just far too interconnected.
The fact that the rocket landed again successful means that anything going into space is going to be much, much cheaper in the future as competitors to SpaceX try to copy the effort and come up with at least something that can compete commercially against SpaceX. That is what is so significant about this particular flight in addition to the payload that actually got up into space.
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.
You've had it explained to you several times. This is exactly the sort of story that Slashdot should be running. Most of its readers are interested in exactly this kind of inspiring and exciting scientific achievement (also loud rockets and flames and stuff). And that didn't happen by accident, it's Slashdot's raison d'etre.
If you don't like it, just fuck off somewhere else!
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
Why are you wasting time posting idiotic questions to Slashdot instead of spending every waking moment searching for a cure for cancer, or whatever you believe to be the single most important issue?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
It effects you the way early sea exploration did. Without that, I would be living in some other country, if I was living at all.
Bruce Perens.
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.
Perhaps, but the reality is that Elon did not design these rockets himself. What he did was convince the best minds in rocketry to move to a startup company with fewer resources than the companies they were leaving, longer work hours, and greater job insecurity. His ability to create a vision and convince people to buy into it is his real strength (as was Jobs etc) and that is what he knows best. Talent isn't easily attracted by 'we will ramp up production to xxx units per year'. It is attracted by 'we will change the world...' etc etc.
Having said that, you are right that at some point Elon needs to deliver in quantity, both with SpaceX and Tesla. The reality is that changing the world normally requires a lot of boring grunt work and it will be interesting to see if he is a good enough business manager to pull this off. Worryingly, this lack of pragmatism is what sunk Jobs before his second coming. He got carried away with the vision on things like Lisa and this got in the way of making a commercially viable product. One just hopes that Musk's reality distortion field has not developed to a level where it engulfs the host yet.
Fuel isn't a big part of the cost. It's around $200K for the entire load.
We have yet to find out about the refurbishment costs, they haven't even done the test burns on the second returned booster yet, but they are trying for essentially no refurbishment.
This latest rocket came in at twice the speed (2 km/sec through the atmosphere) and had a 12-G burn at the end, and there might have been damage that wasn't on the other two recovered boosters.
Bruce Perens.
The GPS satellites have a limited lifespan. They need periodic replacement, which means we need more launches. If the US can buy those launches for less money, then there is more money for beer.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The headline ends with the word "again", making it sound like this is a repeat of a prior event, but in reality this is very much a new achievement. The first two successful landings were from relatively light payloads sent into low Earth orbit (LEO). This mission was sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO), a much harder destination. The max payload for GTO is well under half what it is for LEO, because you need to get the satellite going much faster.
To get a big satellite to that orbit, SpaceX has to push the launch vehicle a lot closer to its limits. The engines burn longer, on the ascent, leaving the rocket with less fuel to try and slow itself for landing. At the same time, the first stage boosts to a much higher suborbital peak. It therefore has to re-enter through more atmosphere, while going faster, with less fuel to slow down. The increased speed and distance means more heating of the bottom of the rocket, which doesn't have anything like the heat shielding a Dragon capsule (or similar) would. Fortunately, it's not going as fast as an orbital capsule... but it's still going a lot faster than it would be on a launch to LEO.
Demonstrating that the first stage can be recovered even after a launch to GTO is a really big deal. In it's own way, it's as big a deal as the first two successful landings. In December we saw the first ever landing for an orbital booster, then a few weeks ago we saw the first ever landing at sea (which is necessary for GTO boosters to have any hope of landing, but that launch was a LEO launch). Today, we saw the first even landing of a GTO launcher. That is a huge deal!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
The landing is at about 9:10 here but there isn't very much to see: it was a night landing from a nearby camera - the moment of landing is invisible in glare. You get to see the glare, then it fades to reveal the landed rocket.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
Well, he IS a script...
No you'll be modded down because its an idiotic question to ask, not mention flamebait.
Not to mention that he's asked the same question on a bunch of posts over the last week. I miss the Moo-Cow Troll and the Appy-App-Appers Troll.
Pretty sure those trolls all died from Systemd exposure