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SpaceX's Falcon 9 Crashes Into Droneship (cbsnews.com)
SpaceX failed to successfully land its Falcon 9 on a drone ship at sea on Wednesday. Prior to today's crash, the company was able to conduct three successful experimental landing of its used rocket in a row. SpaceX founder Elon Musk noted that the booster rocket had a RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly, he explained) on droneship. From a CBS News report: It was the California rocket company's fifth unsuccessful drone-ship landing after three straight successes, one in April and two in May. Including a successful landing at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last December, SpaceX's recovery record now stands at four successes in nine attempts. But the landing attempt was a strictly secondary objective. The mission's primary goal, the launch of two powerful all-electric communications satellites, was a complete success and regardless of the loss of the first stage, company engineers expected to collect valuable data as they continue their push to make such landings routine.
Mr. Musk "get's it". His engineering team is working on the edge of what can be done and failures are going to happen (they're landing a frigging rocket on a ship... backwards). He can either say "we failed" or he can say we had an "RUD". It means the same thing and everyone knows it but it deflects from the technical team somewhat and is gentle signal to the team that their heads aren't on the block (at least yet). It's a good way to lead. Just hope he never uses the world "fail"... because he does have that whole evil genius vibe going.
My impression is that satellites have been using this as part of their attitude control for quite some time. More specifically, they have gyros that they use to change the attitude. Periodically the gyro gets near the limits of what they can do. When that happens, they reset the gyros back to a neutral setting, and offset that with a matching torque against the Earth's magnetic field so the attitude remains constant.
The gyros can move the satellite faster and more easily than the magnetic torquing system, so that's what's used for normal attitude control.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.