9 ms·
SpaceX sticks 11th rocket landing after launching first used Dragon capsule
- friedman23 9y agoIt's already become routine, soon people will expect rockets to be reusable. If they keep up the launches every two weeks and begin even accelerating the pace of launches I do not see how any rocket company will be able to compete for business.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI was just thinking that hey, here we are where a SpaceX landing has only 46 points in 2 hours. It's really cool to see it become routine.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoThere is a tiny part of me that is starting to think Yay! Are we becoming a spacefaring civilization? We are tentatively close.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThe real test is what happens after a ship explodes. Musk himself has said that you can't really improve the reliability that much. Cost is the only vector, and SpaceX is making spaceflight cheap. It's still risky. If it's true that reliability hasn't changed at all, then it's even more likely that we're going to see a string of failures rather than a single isolated incident. That will be the true test: can we take that in stride, or will others get the last word?
- mikeash 9y agoI expect reuse to result in much better reliability in the long term. The engineers will have a much better picture of which components fail and in what way if they can look at flown examples. So far, SpaceX's reliability is not great, but they keep going.
- cpitman 9y agoThat Space Shuttle was reusable, and it still had catastrophic failures.
- valuearb 9y agoThe Space Shuttle was incredibly unsafe design, and it evolved fairly little during it's life. Mixing unthrottable and unstoppable solid rockets with liquid rockets was never a good idea. The massive external fuel tank was vulnerable. The tile system was an achilles heel, and extending the wingspan to force air force payloads on the shuttle made reentry even more dangerous. Finally carrying a huge space plane every flight eliminated more than 80% of its payload capacity. Falcon 9s and Dragons are an evolution of tried and true rocket engineering principles, even capsules are much safer at reentry than the shuttle. Delta showed that type can be launched with a high degree of safety. SpaceX has the advantage of getting returned equipment back from space to learn from and improve.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoCompletely agreed, but let's be honest: we're going to see SpaceX shuttles explode, and people will probably die. I hope not, but the things you're saying now are exactly the same kinds of things people were saying the last time space travel was fashionable. It's just incredibly risky to try to ride an explosion into space, no matter how you do it. Going forward, it might be to our advantage to own it rather than hide it. Yeah, it's dangerous. So let's risk the danger! We courageously do our best and launch ourselves into orbit, and some of us die, but progress marches forward. I'm not sure if that type of message would have a better or worse impact than shielding everyone from the idea that disaster will strike till it happens. It could go either way.
- valuearb 9y agoAgreed, rockets are and will be dangerous for a while. Astronauts are brave to be willing to risk it. Let's hope the Draco escape system will get them out of the next emergency.
- woodandsteel 9y agoWe have airplane accidents every year, a great many if you include private planes, but people keep flying them.
- marze 9y agoIf they can find customers for the recovered stages at 80% of normal price, it will be like printing money. Wow.
- mhandley 9y agoWhy would you want your expensive cargo on a rocket's test flight - much safer to fly on a nice reliable "launch proven" rocket. We've not quite reached this point yet, but I'm sure it's coming.
- jwanga 9y agoWhats interesting is that even if they command 100% of the launch market, The launch market is currently less than 6% of the roughly $200B USD global space industry. That is probably still not enough to fund a Mars colony fleet. As it happens, most of the profits in space are in communication satellites, which is why SpaceX is attempting to launch its own LEO constellation. Some have speculated that if SpaceX can't launch their satellite constellation then they will have bet the farm and lost. However, I think people underestimate what may happen to demand when the cost of access to space drops to dollars/kg from tens of thousands of dollars/kg.
- marktangotango 9y agoI believe this sentiment is spot on. Musks myopic focus on Mars has always been puzzling to me. There are vast fortunes to be made in many areas, the easiest, most immediate in my view is orbital tourism to inflatable habitat destinations. Current falcon, not even heavy is sufficient, lift here. Also, when dream chaser becomes operational, there will be a strong sense of REAL progress. Edit to clarify, I'm referring to the drastic cost reduction reusability gives to reaching orbit, as the parent of this post says. I am saying there are a lot of other desirable, profitable ventures, other than settling Mars, that cheap access to space makes achievable.
- solotronics 9y agomyopic? it's the only current feasible other planet we might be able to live on.
- WestCoastJustin 9y agoYou can watch the recorded live stream landing at https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=37m19s https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=37m19s
- 725686 9y agoWhat happened with the cheering? It's like watching a comedy without the recorded laughter.
- positr0n 9y agoAs the description notes, that is the technical stream. Here's the stream with commentary (and cheering :) ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URh-oPqjlM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URh-oPqjlM8
- mholt 9y agoThe time in the video changes after SpaceX removes all the filler waiting for the intro... just FYI. Here's the updated link: https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=26m8s https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=26m8s
- Pharylon 9y agoSometimes I think I'm smart because I can (mostly) get Webpack to work the way I want. Then I watch a SpaceX livestream and realize, eh, not so much. ;)
- StavrosK 9y agoTo be fair, SpaceX's roadmap is: 1. Land rocket. 2. Reuse rocket. 3. Colonize Mars. 4. Get Webpack to work the way we want.
- agumonkey 9y agolow hanging fruits.. Musk is defintely lazy
- amorphid 9y agoYou are a smarty pants, and you know it. You're just not a billionaire with many, many, many subject matter experts in the field of rocketry working for you. No need to compare yourself to others :)
- caycep 9y agofinding and getting these many subject matter experts to work for you and then get productive results from them also takes a lot of smarts
- nojvek 9y agoGetting webpack to work is hard. Quite a bit of domain specific knowledge required. Do not underestimate yourself. Regarding rockets I think ULA management was probably just sucking our tax money and putting some rockets up every now and then. I really wish we can replicate Elon's way of vision and execution in many different fields. How awesome would the world be if we could scale Elon?
- Kenji 9y agoThe speed at which they develop, implement and successfully use this technology is mind-boggling. Congratulations to everyone involved with this.
- tobych 9y agoThat headline makes no sense to me. What does "sticks" mean here?
- beisner 9y agoIt's a turn of phrase borrowed from judged sports with a jumping/dismount component, especially gymnastics. If a gymnast dismounts from a balance beam and lands without stumbling or bending the knees too much, one would say he has "stuck the landing". In the headline, OP is saying that, by virtue of the landing being near-flawless, SpaceX "stuck" the landing. This is used quite commonly in aviation/aerospace, but colloquially.
- eps 9y agoCan someone explain why the "Stage 1 speed" at the top right on the technical broadcast stream jumps from 6,000 km/h to 24,000 km/h right after the separation? https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFoOqqSIYpw https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFoOqqSIYpw around 22:28 mark In fact, the speed settles at 18,000 km/h after the landing.
- mrep 9y agothat was a bug
- YZF 9y agoWow. Does anyone know what sort of control they have during the final burn? Do they modulate it in closed loop to track the landing profile or is the control via some other actuators? It just blows your mind that you can get this sort of accuracy with these speeds/distance/time. I also wonder how they get real-time accurate positioning. GPS?
- cfreeman 9y agoThere are cold gas thrusters, grid fins, and the main engines are gimballed.
- dasmoth 9y agoIt's mostly GPS and inertial navigation. Probably integrated together with some kind of Kalman filter. The very last few seconds add in data from a radar altimeter. Per the post-launch press conference, this time they added some special paint to the landing pad to give a better radar return. I imagine the steel deck of the ASDS already gives a pretty good radar return.
- ge96 9y agoDoes it start firing the rockets on descent not so much to slow down but as a shield for reentry? I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe the rocket isn't high enough to burn up on re-entry? I'm not sure it's not exactly coated in heat-resistant ("cliche-black-colored") tiles. To me maybe when you fire a plume of exhaust like that it forms a shield around the rocket... not sure.
- djaychela 9y agoI think that the 1st stage separates at ~6000kmh; that's nowhere near the speed of orbit - which is around 28000kmh. I think that explains the ability of the first stage to pass through the atmosphere without a heat shield - it's not the high up, more the speed, I think. From (again, not definitive) knowledge, the rocket fires to slow down (boostback), a re-entry burn, then a landing burn. Indeed, there's info from the horse's mouth here: http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-rockets http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-ro...
- ge96 9y agohorse's mouth haha thanks
- woodandsteel 9y agoI wonder if SpaceX will throw a big party after their 100th booster Earth landing.