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Fourth SpaceX Rocket Successfully Landed on A Drone Ship (theverge.com)
Saturday a SpaceX rocket completed the company's fourth successful landing at sea (watched by over 100,000 viewers on YouTube and Flickr). Saturday's landing means Elon Musk's company has now recovered more than half the rockets they've launched. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Saturday's report from The Verge:
Tonight's landing was particularly challenging for SpaceX... The Falcon 9 had to carry its onboard satellite -- called JCSAT-16 -- into...a highly elliptical orbit that takes the satellite 20,000 miles out beyond Earth's surface. Getting to GTO requires a lot of speed and uses up a lot of fuel during take off, more so than getting to lower Earth orbit. That makes things difficult for the rocket landing afterward...there's less fuel leftover for the vehicle to reignite its engines and perform the necessary landing maneuvers.
CEO Elon Musk said the company is aiming to launch its first landed rocket sometime this fall...SpaceX's president, Gwynne Shotwell, estimates that reusing these landed Falcon 9 vehicles will lead to a 30 percent reduction in launch costs.
SpaceX named their drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."
CEO Elon Musk said the company is aiming to launch its first landed rocket sometime this fall...SpaceX's president, Gwynne Shotwell, estimates that reusing these landed Falcon 9 vehicles will lead to a 30 percent reduction in launch costs.
SpaceX named their drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."
Once SpaceX starts flying those "used" cores it will push the whole industry of space flight to the same level of reuse. We are going to see some great advances in engineering coming from all over the world as others start to catch up to SpaceX.
The numbers in the summary are a bit ambiguous/confused:
This was the *sixth* rocket they've landed. They've landed four on drone ships and two on land. That's nowhere near half the rockets they've launched (this was the 28th Falcon 9), but means just over half of their landing attempts (11 total) have succeeded.
More importantly, of the last 7 landing attempts, there were only two failures, both due to simple lack of propellant margin due to the demands of those particular launches...there weren't any failures or control problems, they just ran out of propellant. The last actual hardware failure was flight 21, the Jason-3 launch, which actually landed fine, but had an earlier version of the legs which iced up and failed to lock in the extended position. So it's looking like reliability of future landings can be expected to be quite a bit better than 50%.
All without any nets/cables/tubes/funnels/magnets/giant catcher's mitts.
Let me see? Space is quite big, unimaginably big in fact, and it is very likely there will be insane amounts resources out there on mostly dead planets, with no ecological harm done to anyone. Not to mention we can only examine a insignificant fraction of it in any detail, i.e. not through inferring information from specs of electromagnetic radiation.
Yes we are a long way from exploring even our solar system in any great detail or harvesting any resources, however if we do not make a start, because we keep saying whats the immediate payback? We will never get there. We also are currently benefiting space technology such as communications, GPS, and the government being able to better spy on us, oops the last one might not be a benefit.
As for people suffering, yes there are, but it isn't through lack of resources, it is through our greed, fear and hate. In the US 40% of food produced is waste. Obesity is a problem. Obesity kills 3 times as many people as malnutrition worldwide, (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9742960/Obesity-killing-three-times-as-many-as-malnutrition.html), OK the malnourished are probably more likely to young children, but still we clearly have enough resources. There are 7 billion people in the world, if a few thousand concentrate on building rockets, it is not going stop the rest of us coming up with a solution. In order to fix suffering we need social/political solution not a scientific one.
This is the view from the rocket as it descends and lands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More importantly, parachutes have no precision and are subject to the wind.
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