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SpaceX Successfully Lands Falcon 9 Rocket On Solid Ground For the Second Time (theverge.com)
SpaceX successfully landed another Falcon 9 rocket after launching the vehicle into space on Sunday evening from Florida. The Verge reports: Shortly after takeoff, the vehicle touched down at SpaceX's Landing Complex 1 -- a ground-based landing site that the company leases at the Cape. It marks the second time SpaceX has pulled off this type of ground landing, and the fifth time SpaceX has recovered one of its rockets post-launch. The feat was accomplished a few minutes before the rocket's second stage successfully put the company's Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will rendezvous with the International Space Station later this week. It's also the first time this year SpaceX has attempted to land one of its rockets on land. For the past six launches, each rocket has tried landing on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. That's because drone ship landings require a lot less fuel to execute than ground landings.
What that said the launch was by the numbers and was awesome. I've got friends in FL who heard the sonic boom of the first stage reentering.
Since they were only boosting Dragon to LEO they didn't have to deploy the drone ship. I watched it online last night. I did notice the feed started with only a few minutes before launch which saddened me because I like to listen in on the launch coordinator loop while they're going through all the preflight checks.
Hopefully SpaceX will expose the audio feed so those of us who are nerds about this can listen in for the whole thing.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
the first time *this year* SpaceX has attempted to land one of its rockets on land
"I've got friends in FL who heard the sonic boom of the first stage reentering."
I watched some Periscope recordings from people watching the landing, and they all seemed to be shocked by the loudness of the sonic boom. Some thought the 1st stage booster exploded after landing (because it takes a while for the sound to reach them).
SpaceX claims "this is no worse than the sonic boom from the shuttle landing", but I don't know, I've heard the sonic boom from the shuttle landing at Edwards and it was like someone hitting a drum, not like an explosion.
NASA was lucky to land one shuttle per month, whereas SpaceX has dreams of launching/landing once per week.
Also the people near the Space Coast or Vandenberg might be able to deal with the sonic booms (as space is pretty much their whole industry), but if SpaceX moves launches/landings to Brownsville, Texas, I can imagine they will upset a lot of people in Harlingen, McAllen, and Corpus Christi not used to rocket launches or supersonic aircraft (not to mention our friends across the border in Reynosa).
One of the interesting things in this trip are a couple of Space adapters that will let Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, SpaceX's Crew Dragon
spacecraft, and anyone else that comes along to dock to the station.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7...
No word yet on if Apple will follow this standard or come up with their own.
That's the plan. It may be possible for some launches to have all three come back to dry land if the payload is at the low end of capabilities.
Can anyone explain why landing on a ship uses a lot less fuel then on land. I would think since you have to be far more accurate to land on a ship it would require more fuel.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
For 2016 they are hoping to do 16 launches and that's considered overly optimistic, SpaceX has been doing around 10 launches per year. To get to 1 launch per week (52 per year) is a huge step forward and will not come for years. Even if they do get to 1 launch per week, with 3 launch sites that's still 17 launches per site per year. Of those only LEO missions can return to the launch location, launches to GEO have to land downrage on a drone ship. All in all, the good people of Texas have nothing to worry about.
Well, in theory it *could* if it had the fuel, and I bet that for a really light GTO payload they could manage to save enough fuel for the boostback burn, but in practice satellites intended for GSO aren't that light. It would be a longer boostback burn (than for LEO) anyhow, because the first stage is usually going faster at separation when it's targeting GTO, but for a really light payload the second stage wouldn't need to burn for as long either so maybe the first stage could separate a little earlier.
No matter what the target orbit, the first stage will always be well down-range, and have a lot of velocity in that down-range direction, at separation. For ground landings, it needs to reverse that velocity to come back to the launch site, then do another burn to slow down enough to not burn up in the atmosphere, and then the landing burn. For GTO launches, it usually skips the first burn (boostback) and just continues along that down-range trajectory, doing just the re-entry and then landing burns. This obviously needs less fuel, but also means that the rocket is hundreds of miles downrange by the time it lands.
It's not theoretically impossible to do a full boostback burn after a GTO launch, though... just impractical given how much fuel the first stage uses on the ascent of a GTO launch.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
SpaceX started streaming a live "technical webcast" feed for the last several launches; here's the one for last night's launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the past I think it's been linked from the webcast page, but you can also find it by searching Youtube.
Next try will be on 'dry land'.
The barge is placed down range so that the booster does not have to reverse course to return near the launch site. It just continues on a ballistic path, only firing up the engines to allow a soft landing.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...
The "lot less fuel" statement in the summary may be technically true, but the main reason for the drone ship versus ground landings are the launch parameters for the payload. From Florida, Dragon to the ISS is a ~50 degree inclination LEO shooting NE, whereas communication satellites are geosynchronous shooting ESE. The former launch separates stages quite close to land, whereas the latter separation is quite far out over the Atlantic.
Anybody want a peanut?
Attempt to land the Falcon rocket on a white 18-wheeler.
#DeleteChrome