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SpaceX Successfully Lands A Falcon 9 Rocket At Sea For The Third Time (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for the third time in a row. The Verge reports: "It was the third time in a row the company has landed a rocket booster at sea, and the fourth time overall. The landing occurred a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 delivered the THAICOM-8 satellite to space, where it will make its way to geostationary geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). GTO is a high-elliptical orbit that is popular for satellites, sitting more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. The 3,100-kilogram satellite will spend 15 years improving television and data signals across Southeast Asia." The company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship for the second time earlier this month. UPDATE 5/27/15: Frank249 writes in a comment: "Elon Musk just tweeted: 'Rocket landing speed was close to design max and used up contingency crush core, hence back and forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'" He went on to tweet: "Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port)."
Elon Musk just tweeted: 'Rocket landing speed was close to design max & used up contingency crush core, hence back & forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I can't tell if you're trolling or doing a sarcastic piss-take of an SJW. However. "We" aren't doing it, Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing it. They are doing it because it's Musk's money and Musk's company, so they're going to be doing what's important to Musk, not what's important to you. If you disagree, feel free to earn a few billion of your own dollars and and start your own company and then go ahead and try to solve whatever problems are important to you. Best of luck in your new endeavors. You're welcome.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Elon's tweeted that the landing came down a bit hard but it shouldn't have done anything but impacted the crumple zones on the landing legs. Since the legs are replaced anyways, this shouldn't impact reusability. Right now, this is the fourth successful landing, and it looks like the basics of landing have been really worked out. Whether they can then actually reuse them is still in the air.
Also, there's been prior speculation that SpaceX was going to try to reuse the fairing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fairing- which is the nose cone around the payload which helps protect the payload and keep it aerodynamic during the first part of the launch. If they can do fairing recover and reuse that would be another avenue for serious cost reduction. They mentioned fairing reuse as something they were working towards on the broadcast which is as far as I know the most prominent time they've mentioned it. So it looks like they are going to be trying to seriously do that. How much this all actually reduces cost remains to be seen.
Right now, even without reuse, SpaceX is substantially cheaper than every other company for the medium size payloads. (They aren't launching the really small ones and until the Falcon Heavy is set up they won't be able to launch the really big ones). So even without reuse they are having a substantial impact on the market. The other major players, ULA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (which is a joint Boeing and Lockheed company) and Ariane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (the big French rocket launcher who is currently the biggest rocket launch company) are both planning on reuse programs, but they are essentially playing catchup. ULA has a plan for just reusing the engines which may be interesting. Ariane has a similarly interesting idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket) but neither imagines reuse any earlier than 2020, by which point, SpaceX will have been doing full first stage reuse and probably even doing reuse for the Falcon Heavy and will be working on their next generation Raptor rockets. That's not to say that ULA and the others aren't doing interesting things - their ACES proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage is really neat, but in terms of reducing cost through reuse, SpaceX is way ahead of everyone else.
Is there a time line out there when the will actually reuse a Falcon 9 rocket? What type of milestones are they looking for?
The plan currently is for the first reuse to occur by the end of summer http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/09/falcon_9_rocket_reused_in_two_months/ but given SpaceX's general tendency to not do things on time, by November seems like a safer bet.
If I understand correctly the rockets that they are recovering are for evaluating purposes only. That is, they are trying to figure out the type of stress and damage a rocket undergoes so they can design a rocket that is durable enough to be launched. The last one suffered so much damage that it could never fly again.
Not quite. The first landed rocket was kept for evaluation purposes. The one that suffered damage seemed to be possibly reflyable but given the damage they decided that it was better to subject to it to very extensive testing. They are intending to relaunch (very likely it will be the second landed one which landed on the drone ship).
For interest's sake, the idea of a crushable hhoneycomb landing leg arrangement was used for the Apollo Lumar Modules. It was very light as it only needed to be used once, unlike a hydraulic or spring system. Have a look at page 6 of the LM Structures document at http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a...