SpaceX Launches NASA's Planet-Hunting Satellite, Successfully Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket (theverge.com)

SpaceX launched NASA's TESS spacecraft Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship following takeoff. This marks 24 successful landings for SpaceX now, notes The Verge. We will update this post once TESS is deployed into orbit. From the report: TESS is NASA's newest exoplanet hunter. The probe is tasked with staring at stars tens to hundreds of light-years from Earth, watching to see if they blink. When a planet passes in front of a distant star, it dims the star's light ever so slightly. TESS will measure these twinkles from a 13.7-day orbit that extends as far out as the distance of the Moon. The satellite won't get to its final orbit on this launch. Instead, the Falcon 9 will put TESS into a highly elliptical path around Earth first. From there, TESS will slowly adjust its orbit over the next couple of months by igniting its onboard engine multiple times. The spacecraft will even do a flyby of the Moon next month, getting a gravitational boost that will help get the vehicle to its final path around Earth. Overall, it will take about 60 days after launch for TESS to get to its intended orbit; science observations are scheduled to begin in June.

Comments

News from the future

[ComputerInsultant]

Slashdot has gotten out of sync with the real world. In the real world, the webcast of the launch is still going on and TESS has not yet been released. Heck, the final burn has not even started.

Re:News from the future

[ComputerInsultant]

And TESS has been released, to Slashdot to real world synchronization can now move to the next stage. With any luck full synchronization can be achieved in just a few days.

Re:News from the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot can't be out of sync with reality because it doesn't publish original content. It's all user submissions, usually articles from other sites.

From TFA, which slashdot reposted 12 minutes later:

Update April 18th, 7:08PM ET: SpaceX launched the TESS spacecraft at 6:51PM ET on Wednesday and successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship following takeoff. That marks 24 successful landings for SpaceX now, and 13 drone ship recoveries. Meanwhile, the mission is ongoing as TESS hasn’t been deployed into orbit yet.

Re:News from the future

[Rei]

Slashdot these days...

It still amazes me

[Anonymous Coward]

That those rockets fall on a drone ship, upwards and reusable.

I guess there will be one day that the news is that they didn't land successfully one of their rockets.

Re:It still amazes me

[Rei]

From a rocket perspective, the next launch is the interesting one: the first launch of Block 5. Designed to be fully reusable without refurbishing for 10 launches. 100+ with refurbishment every 10 launches.

Obviously, I'm sure it'll be a while before they're confident enough to actually do that; early on they'll surely tear it down between every launch and inspect to make sure it's holding up as well as they expect it to. But they've learned from where wear and tear was occurring on past rockets, and Block 5 is designed to prevent it.

Re:It still amazes me

[jabuzz]

It is still pretty amazing, but take a look at a picture of a GBU-43/B bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Basically a Falcon 9 first stage is a large grid fin stabilized precision bomb with landing legs. In effect the military paid for development of the technology that allows the Falcon 9 to hit the land zones pretty much spot on every time. They where originally a Soviet invention.

So far so good

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks good so far, but its far from over. The last Falcon 9 burn is done and satellite deployment has completed. Now hopefully the crafts onboard propulsion can get it to its final orbit over the next few weeks/month. Note that this is one of the cheaper NASA missions, which probably means they skipped some of their quality controls and backup systems to save money. And it was built by Northrup Grumman, which has had some issues as of late with equipment reliability (LCS, Zuma, etc).

Re: Trump is upset. No rockets in prison. #UNFAI

[Anonymous Coward]

He's going to prison to die there. Get under it.

"24 successful landings"

[Balial]

So how much has Space X saved already by not junking that may rockets?

Re: "24 successful landings"

[Anonymous Coward]

They saved a lot of flying Phallic objects.

Re: "24 successful landings"

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how many successful landings do they need to do to get a ROI.

Re:"24 successful landings"

[mschuyler]

There is a serious savings when they re use a booster, but few of the existing recovered boosters will be saved in the future due to the advent of the Block 5 series which are slightly bigger, have retractable landing gears (rather than removable) and other improvements. Those are the more valuable boosters to save and re use. . The earlier ones are effectively out of date. They may very well use the older used boosters they do have on those missions where recovery is not an issue and they intentionally ditch them.

Re:"24 successful landings"

[Anonymous Coward]

To this point they've probably actually lost a bit of money over if they would have just thrown away the stages. However now that they're standardizing the design and have worked out the bugs (with the Block 5, which is due to fly shortly) their savings should start adding up pretty quickly. This is something that no government has done let alone a private company, so there were bound to be some difficulties. Though I think even SpaceX was surprised by some of the issues they had to overcome. But given how reliably they've been retrieving them the last year or so, the time they've had go over the data, inspect the recovered stages, and play with the designs I think its safe to say that the block 5 will deliver on at least a good part of their hopes of reusability and cost savings. Even the Russians seem to have ceded the commercial launch market to SpaceX.

Re:"24 successful landings"

[thesupraman]

Ummm, no.

As of February they had reused 8 times, and 25% of their 2017 launches reused.
Book value on the first stages is estimated to be around $30 million.
Even if you imagine it costs them 1/3 of that to refurb, thats still $20 million saved per reuse.
By 8 times is 160 million.

Now, unless you are going to claim all possible development expenses against that, which would
be a bit foolish on a technology that is obviously in ongoing use, then it is easily going to be
a win already.

Note that in the start of 2018, they reused 7 stages for 9 launches...

Re:"24 successful landings"

[drinkypoo]

Though I think even SpaceX was surprised by some of the issues they had to overcome.

Yeah, one of those issues in particular took a lot of people by surprise. (Okay, we don't actually know they used Kobe Steel's aluminum... but AFAIK that theory is still in play)

Re:"24 successful landings"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I am including development costs, because it would be foolish not to include them in an assessment of how much money they've saved to this point. I think you got the direct stage costs in the ballpark, but you're forgetting about the ADS's (at $3-6 Million each), crane services, specialized retrieval equipment, tugboats, etc. That along with the development costs would eat through $160 million pretty quick. But as I originally noted the paltry sum that they've lost up to this point will likely be dwarfed by the money they save over the next few years when instead of reusing once they're reusing 10 or more times.

Re:"24 successful landings"

[Karhgath]

Also people do not realize this often, but right now SpaceX has done 8 flights this year. The total worldwide is 38 at this time in 2018. This is 20% of worldwide flights. Last year was also around 20% worldwide. They launched more often than Soyuz, and more often than Long March LVs in 2017 (both have multiple type of vehicles, config and profiles, while the Falcon is mostly a single design). Of their 18 launches last year, 5 were reused, so until they are all at block 5 we won't really know the impact of reusability. But man, they are getting contracts after contracts and can launch at a pretty fast pace. Any normal corp would sit on this cash cow, but they are still pushing for reuse, falcon heavy, BFR and not slowing down.

Even if on the fence about reuse, or outright think it is foolish for any reason or are vocal again Elon/SpaceX (and yes, some criticism are valid), if you remove those from the equation, they have a pretty nice launcher: fast deploy, can do a lot of mission, incredible primary mission success rate. Sure they did not invent anything new in rocket science, but they still got here quite fast.

No matter what they say

[Provocateur]

SpaceX is waaay better. Better than (space) sex. And this is post X (tenth post)

Next up block 5!

[RhettLivingston]

And the start of the final leg to manned flight certification - seven block 5 flights to go!

Re: Next up block 5!

[spire3661]

You know what Falcon Heavy cost the taxpayers? Nothing, zilch, nada. How much money are we going to waste on ULA before we finally admit it exists to funnel tax dollars and nothing more? SLS is a sad joke in the face of the modern reality.

Re: Next up block 5!

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't buying the results. They can't afford the price. They are simply outrunning ferocious attempts to put a leash on them and protect the pork their business model threatens.

I've been where you're at. At the engineering level, we always either railed about the excessive requirements or drank the koolaid just to have peace of mind. The higher ups always whined too, but at least they knew that the engineering "requirements" are simply the means to keep the engineers employed long term. I didn't truly understand that until I accidentally let myself get lassoed into a position that was involved in negotiations.

The management doesn't believe that there will be anything else if they get the job done. The sad truth is, they are probably right because congress didn't give approval out of an interest in space - it was given to feed money and jobs into their districts.

On the other hand, SpaceX is always ready to get a job done so that they can go on to the next job, and the next, and the next. The real fun is yet to come.

If it upsets you, take action and send them an application.

Re: Next up block 5!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems as though ULA is going to be putting people on a first flight of a completely new design as opposed to possibly an eighth flight of a modification of a product line with around 60 flights by then. There is no amount of engineering that makes that safe. If you think you've achieved it, then you've both way over-engineered the product and blinded yourself to reality.

Re: Next up block 5!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, of course more is expected of ULA, they expect the government to front most of the development costs. Less is expected of SpaceX because they are a completely different development model. Traditional launch developments have the contractor do some initial plans and development at least partly on their own dime and then after getting the contract the government picks up all of the costs and adds a decent profit margin on top. SpaceX turns that pretty much 180 degrees, doing most of the development on their own dime and getting a bit of seed money from the government now and again for specialized requirements, but mostly they get paid on fixed price launch contracts.

Re: Next up block 5!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which completely new design? Vulcan isn't going to make its first flight with people...

The folks going to mars

[wolfheart111]

Id be scared, Sure signup to go live on mars, what are the chances of him actually succeeding?