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SpaceX Falcon 9 debris from failed CRS-7 launch found in sea off Scilly
- cconcepts 11y agoI would have assumed that you could calculate the approximate landing area of at least the larger debris and that there would be some legislation forcing you to at least try to locate/clean it up. I suppose it doesn't present that much of a threat to anyone (once it has landed).
- JshWright 11y agoMost expendable launchers are just dropped into the ocean anyway. SpaceX is the only company that has plans to completely recover the first stage. I can also assure you that they did do everything they could to locate and recover the debris from this launch. But for some altruistic environmental concern though ... They wanted every piece they could find so they could figure out what happened. EDIT: Based on analysis from /r/spacex, this is from CRS-4 (not CRS-7), which successfully boosted its second stage, then performed a retropropulsion to test rentry (it didn't have landing legs, so a barge landing couldn't be attempted). I suspect SpaceX still tried to recover as much as they could of the stage, in order to see how well it handled the rentry.
- silvestrov 11y agoDon't you mean: But NOT for some altruistic ...
- JshWright 11y agoIndeed I do, thanks (the danger of typing on mobile... linebreaks are common and proofreading is hard).
- peter303 11y agoBlue Origin just demonstrated a recoverable rocket. But their ambition is just suborbital which only needs 1/8th the power or orbital flight.
- mikeash 11y agoI believe Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are both planning for reusable orbital launchers. They're pretty far out from flying, though. I think SpaceX is the only one actually putting stuff into orbit with concrete plans for reusability.
- JshWright 11y agoYeah, by "launcher" I meant "rockets that can put things into orbit". New Shepard is cool and all, but it's not really in the same weight class as "real" launchers. https://i.imgur.com/g2VIKVC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/g2VIKVC.jpg
- akiselev 11y agoTheoretically, sure, but practically the amount of turbulence experienced by a supersonic rocket (all of them, except those that blow up in the first 10-30 seconds after lift off) is just insane. Any sort of errors that you would have in the calculation describing the initial explosion (already largely unknown because it's an uncharacterized/unstudied catastrophic failure) would only compound over and over again for minutes until they hit the earth. Most rocket pieces are very dense, like all of the high pressure & cold temperature fuel storage and distribution, and those that don't vaporize tend to have a very high terminal velocity, some even supersonic themselves, adding more turbulence to the calculation. Most catastrophic failures also happen with a decent amount of propellant so there's now a low pressure (less than 1 atm) explosion fueled by literally tons of volatile high pressure liquid which creates even more uncertainty. Oh and hey, since the rocket carries all of its own oxidizer, the explosion usually isn't limited by the availability of atmospheric oxygen. Simply put, every step in this chain of events is mind bogglingly chaotic and nondeterministic. You can create boundaries for how far the pieces could have possibly traveled using assumptions based on the laws of physics, but even at an altitude of 10km, perfect GPS pre-failure, and subsonic speeds we're talking about an area tens of kilometers in radius before you account for ocean currents that quickly expands to an area that is hundreds of kilometers in radius. All of this happens before the first search ship is even in the area (fastest boat is about 100km/h and that's a racing yacht incapable of search and recovery). This truly is an intractable problem until we have radar covering every cubic kilometer of the earth, and even then it'll still be really difficult.
- jld89 11y agoI thought it was Sicily and that Scilly was a keystroke mistake. Funny that...
- gchp 11y agoBefore reading your comment I still thought it said Sicily. My brain just assumed that was what it said
- willthames 11y agoIt doesn't help that Scilly isn't usually used in isolation. Usually the group is referred to as the Isles of Scilly or the Scilly Isles. None of the islands is actually called Scilly.
- m-i-l 11y agoBut the residents apparently prefer the Isles of Scilly to the Scilly Isles.
- Shengbo 11y agoNow that's just some Scilly nitpicking. ..I'll let myself out.
- Symbiote 11y agoI presume few people outside Britain know how "Scilly" is pronounced, so for their benefit: like "silly". (I've heard "Scilly Isles" far more often than "Isles of Scilly", but I'm nowhere near local.)
- mrmcd 11y agoPerhaps they need a government tourism office that focuses on advertising the many wonderful hiking opportunities on the islands. A Ministry of Scilly Walks.
- zensavona 11y ago
- riffraff 11y agowow, barnacles are crazy efficient, I wouldn't expect the section to be covered in them so much already.
- Kiro 11y agoAre those barnacles? Looks like mussels to me (Mytilidae).
- cconcepts 11y agoIts weird really, I can't do much these days without someone tracking me and using that information to target me with ads and yet whole commercial airliners and chunks of space rockets can vanish only to wash up on beaches covered in barnacles...
- rplnt 11y agoEven whole planes full of people can vanish.
- manigandham 11y agoHow are these things related? I'm sure if all these chunks of rockets were constantly connected to the internet we could track them too...
- Mchl 11y agoPeople at /r/spacex claim it might be actually not CRS-7 debris, but from some earlier flight
- statingobvious 11y agoHere is a link to a thread discussing the origins: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falcon_9_updates/cxelftg https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falco...
- jackgavigan 11y agoI'm guessing SpaceX will want to recover this so they can inspect it to see if they can learn anything useful.
- Simorgh 11y agoSometimes the timing of unconnected events is curious on a cosmic scale. Only a day or two ago New Shepherd reached a milestone. Today parts from a past SpaceX mission wash up onshore. The proximity of these events show that space exploration is witnessing a lot of activity from agents who are operating independently.
- pocketstar 11y agoCorrelation != causation. Only recently has mass media decided to push tech billionaire's pet projects as "space news", that's is all this shows. There are dozens of other arguably more significant space projects flying under the mass media's radar.
- wertop 11y agoWhich projects? Would love to know.
- mikeash 11y agoMe too. I can't think of anything going on in space flight right now more significant than SpaceX's reusability efforts
- pocketstar 11y agoSpaceX's reusabulity efforts are just another incremental improvement to existing rocket technology. Reusable launch vehicles are nothing new. If they can get launch costs down to $60m with their reusable technology that would be great! However, they still can't launch anything >5000kg so it's a pretty mixed bag and a lot of good marketing.
- mikeash 11y agoReusable launch vehicles are nothing new? I can think of only one other, and it ended up being unbelievably expensive, costing far more than an equivalent expendable launcher. SpaceX's launch cost is already about $60 million in expendable mode, so your comment about bringing it "down to $60 with their reusable technology" makes no sense to me. If they pull it off, the cost might drop to more like $10-30 million. A rocket that costs like an expendable launcher but can be reused will be a massive game changer, not "just another incremental improvement." Maybe all the changes needed to get to that point are incremental, but that doesn't mean the result won't be huge.
- balabaster 11y agoIt's interesting that it took less time to find a 10m by 4m piece of debris from a failed space launch that took place on the opposite side of the planet than to find an entire missing airliner with a last known GPS coordinates...
- verandaguy 11y agoIf you're talking about MH370, pieces of the aircraft are washing up and getting found on various islands in the western part of the Indian Ocean. It just takes time because (presumably) the currents aren't as favourable to make parts of the plane wash up as in the North Atlantic. Incidentally, large parts of the aircraft - including the fuselage itself - may have sunk already, which was the case with AF447 a few years ago.
- JshWright 11y agoThis isn't from a failed launch. This is from CRS-4, about 18 months ago.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoAre you implying that there's some sort of conspiracy and that global tidal currents are somehow in on it?
- gadders 11y agoTangentially related, but if anyone wants to follow a very funny Facebook page, they could do a lot worse than add the one for the Isles of Scilly Police: https://www.facebook.com/IslesofScillyPolice/ https://www.facebook.com/IslesofScillyPolice/
- cecilpl 11y agoIt's actually CRS-4 (which launched in September 2014), not CRS-7. See the /r/spacex investigation thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falcon_9_updates/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falco...