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SpaceX Successfully Launches and Lands a Used Rocket For the Second Time (theverge.com)
SpaceX has successfully launched and landed a recycled Falcon 9 rocket for the second time. "The rocket's first stage -- the 14-story-tall core that houses the fuel and the rocket's main engines -- touched down on one of the company's autonomous drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after taking off from a launchpad at nearby Cape Canaveral, Florida," reports The Verge. From the report: This particular rocket previously flew in January, when it was used to put 10 satellites into orbit for communications company Iridium. The rocket then landed on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX retrieved the rocket and spent the next few months refurbishing it in preparation for today's launch. This afternoon, it was used to launch Bulgaria's first communications satellite for TV service provider Bulsatcom. The landing wasn't easy, though. Because the rocket had to push BulgariaSat-1 to such a high orbit, the first stage experienced more force and heat during reentry than any other Falcon 9, according to a tweet from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Musk even warned that there was a "good chance [the] rocket booster doesn't make it back." Shortly after the landing, though, Musk returned to Twitter to add that the rocket booster used "almost all of the emergency crush core," which helps soften the landing.
Well, now it's just routine. :p
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Much excellent!
Next...Mars?
good name for a club
using used rockets
how ghetto
That's actually the best part.
SpaceX Successfully Launches and Lands a Used Rocket For the Second Time
I think it means they have now reflown two first stages, each one having done so once, rather than that they have reused a single first stage two times. In other words "second time" applies to the class of event, not the specific rocket instance. I don't follow it too closely though so maybe someone can confirm that.
It's a little ambiguously phrased.
I got a little nervous twice, the first I thought the flight computer was going to scrub the launch at the last second (did anyone see the twitchy countdown numbers at the last 10 seconds? The counter incremented once or twice, it was weird).
The second was due to the LOS of the first stage at the barge, but I was pleasantly surprised when the image returned.
Hey, remember those assholes that would said this shit was impossible? Remember how when they landed a rocket that those same assholes said it wouldn't be reusable? Remember after they relaunched it the first time those assholes downplayed the amount of money saved and the significance of it? YOU WERE WRONG, ASSHOLES. SCIENCE WINS.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The web cast cut off video of the barge immediately after showing the rocket upright. So when do we get to see the new robot for anchoring and stabilizing the landed rocket (the roomba)?
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff
... how the landed first stage looked as though one of the legs [the one nearest the camera, left hand side of the image] looked to be a little "collapsed" in comparison with the other three?
I am wondering if it was just a trick of a slightly wide-angle lens... but then again... this is still so far ahead of anything that anyone else is doing, it seems churlish to quibble...
Good for Ol' Musky.
Cape Canaveral is a land mass. Cape Kennedy is the space center on the Cape Canaveral land mass.
Where is a link that actually shows the launch and return? The Google can't seen to find it and my beer's getting warm. Tropic Thunder is on....
Take a look at the YouTube video and skip to 34:08 - the angle of the 1st stage main fuselage is not perpendicular to the deck of "Of Course I Still Love You"...
Falcon 9 runs on Linux kernal. Not sure if it's Ubuntu or Red Hat tho.l
Good
It looks like it might be at a bit of an angle, I think Musk Tweeted that it hit the deck pretty hard. Hopefully it just crushed the one of the legs and the rest of the rocket is in good shape. Still they're bringing them down pretty regularly now, ULA must be soiling their pants.
I agree, it looks as if the consumable crush core was compressed to near its limit.
For interest's sake, the honeycomb crush cores were (first?) used in the Apollo Lunar Module, see page 6 of https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a...
2nd time re-used?
As is often the case, video dropped out from the barge during landing, however just before it dropped out there was a big circle of white water on the far/left side of the barge, and when we reacquired signal the booster was landed off-center near/right. This looks to me like they still had a fair bit of horizontal velocity on landing - another indicator that this landing was near to failure. In a few days we'll get the video and know better.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
She wasn't centered very well, must have had a hard landing due to a swell or wave.
The landing was hard because the stage had an extremely difficult landing profile, the most difficult one so far. It entered the atmosphere at a ridiculously high speed. The speed at the beginning of the re-entry burn (just before the stage really bites into the atmosphere) was 8600km/hr and 6600km/hr at the end of the burn. Going at 6600km/hr through the upper atmosphere puts you right on the edge of burning up. The final landing burn had to use three engines as opposed to the usual one engine.
In comparison, for the CRS11 landing, the second stage was going at 4500km/hr at the beginning of the re-entry burn, and 3500km/hr at the end of the burn. The landing burn was using only one engine. Because of the slower speed, it was far more easy for the stage to make a nearly perfect landing.
IIRC, on a really dodgy landing like today's the stage actually aims for the side of the ship and not the centre, so that if the landing burn fails, the stage doesn't sink the drone ship. When the landing burn begins, the stage corrects its target towards the centre. If you watch the feed from the ship, you can see from the water disturbance that the stage is over the water on the far side. It must have done a crazy divert to land on the near side of the ship, which explains the fact that the legs used their crush core shock absorption. It was probably 50/50 that this stage would survive.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Stages have went boom on the drone ships before. They've never sunk.