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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)."
Congratulations to everyone at Space X who contributed to this awesome achievement! You have made space flight exciting again!
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
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.'
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Why are we doing things like this? They're a waste of time and money, which could be spent on things like curing HIV and cancer, ending world hunger, or finding a solution to global warming. Spaceflight solves none of these problems and is a complete waste of money. It's also a waste of talent because these scientists could be putting their effort into solving so many more important problems. Why go to space when we need to solve our problems here on Earth? I'll be censored to -1 because this is unpopular with Slashdot users, most of whom don't care about solving the real problems in the world.
The United States put men on the moon in 1969. After decades of multicultural bullshit, billions of dollars squandered on welfare payments to oxygen thieving minorities, and Obama apologizing for ending WW2 all we can do in regards to space flight is land a rocket on a boat? What the fuck is wrong with America?
Trump 2016
Is there a time line out there when the will actually reuse a Falcon 9 rocket? What type of milestones are they looking for?
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. That being said, that particular landing was a difficult one. The rocket had to come in fast and hard.
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.
So good work, Spacex! Landing pencils is quite a trick, and yer doin' it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm interested to know that having recouvered the First Stage, how many times can it be refurbished and reused before failure rates effect the launch?
And, perhaps heven if it's not reusable as a whole, are there indevidual parts that can be reused? It's got to be made of top quality materials, so perhaps there is value in simply shredding it all up and recycling the basic material?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
so he's the boss of a company distributing solar panels, making electric cars and created reusable rockets which is all well and good but now he's beating so many levels in Candy Crush that's cleared entire areas I haven't even heard about?! but... that's my specialty. STAY IN YOUR LANE ELON! >:(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When the rocket and engine are damaged during the landing, that is NOT a successful landing. And all 3 times (including this one) both the rocket and the engine sustained enough damage during the landing that they must be replaced (not repair).
The main purpose of the landing is to recover the engine and possibly the rocket for reuse. If the engine is damage during the landing, then the landing was a failure not a success.
When a self driving car hits a wall hard enough to cause damage that the engine must be replaced, nobody can claim that the vehicle had a successful stop.
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...
Isn't hitting a target 100's of miles precisely a military technology? I mean just imagine the cylinder carry exploive n the drone ship is an enemy target. So we are now in the time when a private company can own tech similar to ICBMs.