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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.
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.
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.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
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.