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SpaceX Successfully Launches and Lands Second Reused Rocket
- ncallaway 9y agoI love that the launch and subsequent landing of a reused first stage is so unexciting that this article has no comments an hour in. It's truly impressive how quickly SpaceX went from experimental landings to boring and routine landings.
- johnnydoe9 9y agoYeah people seem to be getting used to it everywhere, on many forums too. And this is obviously the goal.
- syngrog66 9y agoalso is late Friday night, here in most of US
- fatherzeus 9y agoWhen technology like this reaches the point where it becomes unexciting for most people it's when I feel the most excited. It's no longer "one day into the future experiments" but "I now live in the future".
- peeters 9y agoWell if we're searching for interest, a "first" for this one was that this was the first rocket that has landed on two different oceans. The first launch was from Vandenberg and landed in the Pacific. The second was from Cape Canaveral and landed in the Atlantic.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoAnyword on the second stage? I know they're also working on getting those to land as well.
- tankenmate 9y agoIt incredibly expensive, a satellite that could be lift by a Falcon 9 with a first stage only recovery would have to be lifted by a Falcon Heavy if you wanted to recover the second stage. Basically you'd need to almost double the unfueled weight of the second stage with aerodynamic devices that can withstand the re-entry plasma and the heat shield. And then add the extra weight for the de-orbit and re-entry burns. You would probably more than halve the payload capacity. Even at best is borders on not worth it. [EDIT] fixed typo
- hallmark 9y agoNot worth it - until the delta cost of fuel and maintenance on a FH is less than the cost of dumping a Falcon 9 second stage into the ocean.
- jccooper 9y agoThey're looking at experimenting with that on the payload-less Falcon Heavy test flight. For operational use, the payload penalty of the extra mass on a second stage is sufficiently high that it seems likely that only on FH flights (and not even all of them) would they have the possibility.
- ufmace 9y agoLanding the second stage is gonna be Hard. That's Hard in the sense that landing the first stage was Easy. There were a lot of complex challenges about landing the first stage, but nothing that seemed impossible. Figuring out how to control a spent first stage with almost-empty fuel tanks while falling through the atmosphere at supersonic speed and firing a rocket backwards was surely tough. Getting the control systems right to land that stage lightly on a ship when you're almost out of fuel and have too much thrust to hover is also tough. There's no reason to think that either one should be insurmountable though. If you have the budget and the will to run some experiments and trash some hardware, you should be able to figure it out, and SpaceX had and did. Now for the second stage, there's a fundamentally harder problem of how to slow down the second stage from orbital velocity without making it so heavy to defeat the purpose. I haven't heard any good ideas on that yet. SpaceX has rather different economics from most of the rest of the aerospace industry - they aren't getting any super-lucrative Government contracts, and depend on making a profit on fixed-price launches to stay alive. They don't need a ton of good PR or political will, as they're depending on the size of their invoices for launches compared to the competition doing their work for them. If I was them, I'd focus like 90% of my spare engineering effort on optimizing the first-stage recovery and relaunch process as much as possible for now. They've proven it can work, and now they gotta make it fast and cheap. This will bring in boatloads of cash to get the company in better shape and help them corner the launch market. Once they've optimized the first-stage reuse process, then they can really focus effort on looking for a way to recover second stages.
- phs2501 9y agoIt's the first single orbital booster to have been launched from two sites actually, much less landed. The shuttle almost made it to a second launch site and would have been first here until they killed the Vandenberg pad after Challenger.
- mattybrennan 9y agoGotta Wait for the "Louis CK moment," where the technology it's so boring that people are annoyed by it http://www.cc.com/video-clips/avmzsg/stand-up-louis-ck--give-it-a-second http://www.cc.com/video-clips/avmzsg/stand-up-louis-ck--give...
- drdeadringer 9y agoWhen the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Paraphrased Asimov.
- babyrainbow 9y agoor may be people are realizing that this was not really a big deal in the first place.....
- binarytransform 9y agoYeah we should go back to following the jitney cab news.
- imron 9y agoHaha, yeah, not really any big deal. I mean they're only the only company among all companies and/or nation states with launch capabilities who have ever done it in the history of space travel.
- babyrainbow 9y ago> I mean they're only the only company among all companies and/or nation states with launch capabilities who have ever done it in the history of space travel. That assumes all of them were trying to do it all this time, and were failing all the time, which is not true. I mean, we had control systems in missiles that could track a jet that is doing evasive maneuverer while going as fast as a bullet..like what? half a century ago? Seriously. i don't think landing a small rocket on a barge comes anywhere close to that...
- simonh 9y agoThis thing is powerful enough to put a capsule designed for 7 people into orbit. Not being one of the biggest ever doesn't make it small.
- imron 9y agoNote the reusable part. That sort of tracking is much easier if you don't need to resuse the hardware afterwards. Anyway, anyone else who wants to be able to compete with SpaceX on price is going to need to start doing this before too long, so we'll see how difficult it is.
- Someone 9y agoBe careful about what you love. Apollo went to boring and routine in the eyes of viewers in seven flights, even with the highly exciting third one.
- mabbo 9y agoThe big difference: Apollo was a money sink, whereas each Falcon 9 launch is a profit for SpaceX. When Apollo got boring, they lost funding. SpaceX has a waiting list of customers.
- geezerjay 9y agoThe Apollo program was a money sink because it was an experimental project based entirely on untested technology and subjected to very tight time constraints, whose client was willing to paying a premium to get the results he ordered in record time. SpaceX doesn't have to deal with many of those constraints, and the project needs to be profitable in order to get the program running. Consequently, while the Apollo program design in a 10-year timespan about four launch vehicles, rebuilt from scratch about two dozen launch vehicles and conducted over a dozen manned flight missions to the moon, after nearly two decades of existence SpaceX is being lauded for using a rocket more than once. Requirements are different. Therefore, planning is different and results are also different.
- Someone 9y agoI would guess each Apollo was a profit for Boeing, North American, and Douglas, too, but that doesn't matter. SpaceX has indicated that it wants to be more than a way cheaper way to launch stuff into orbit. That means it needs to find sponsors willing to spend lots of money, and keep them interested for a long time. If new tricks like reusing a rocket soon become "meh", that means it needs many such tricks.
- wdr1 9y agoI mean, that's what happened with the moon landings. Apollo 11 was a huge event, but by Apollo 13 none of the networks carried it.
- dogma1138 9y agoI'm pretty sure the networks jumped on Apollo 13 pretty quickly given what happened.
- Diederich 9y agoMoving toward the ideal: just another kind of 'air'craft.
- imron 9y agoCan't wait to see how this affects their prices and also the competition.
- peeters 9y agoThey've stated in the past that the reused rockets are offered at a 10% discount, of a launch price of around 60 million. But that's expected to widen considerably, for now there's basically no competition and they're still ramping up production and launch capabilities (and are wanting to recoup their investment).
- imron 9y agoYep, I was talking about a point in the future when their first stages have all seen significant reuse.
- sand500 9y agoDon't forget that customers get bumped used in the schedule by quite a bit by agreeing to ride a re used rocket. The extra income from having a sat in space early is much more valuable.
- imron 9y agoAt the moment people are wary of putting payload on a reused rocket. There will soon come a tipping point of being wary of using a rocket that hasn't been flown before.
- sand500 9y agoYeah exactly but earlier launches is a bigger incentive then a discount.
- kuschku 9y agoBut that will take a long time, even with new Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX is an order of magnitude less reliable than Ariane, for now. At exactly the same price. Long term, the only viable competitors of SpaceX include Ariane and Blue Origin.
- ramshanker 9y ago1st Thought: This is making me believe that one day I would have my own satelite. 2nd Thought: By that time, space would already be too junked. Better to use public transport.
- bobbington 9y agoI'd like to put up my own spy satellite. It would be nice to be able to look instantly wherever I want. Probably some rich person will do it one day.
- zeep 9y agoDon't you think that they already are doing that?
- adrianN 9y agoYou can have a microsat today, they're not that expensive. About as much as a used car.
- robin_reala 9y agohttp://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878334920141135872 http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878334920141135872 > Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used almost all of the emergency crush core), but otherwise good
- ben_bai 9y ago3 engine landing burn. That thing came in HOT.
- mabbo 9y agoIf you rewatch the live stream, at 31:45 or so the rocket starts hitting the atmosphere at 6500 km/h, or nearly 2 km/s. The grid fin, used to help steer through the atmosphere is burning, and then the video from that rocket cut out. At that point I simply presumed it was over for it, yet somehow it still managed to land. They'll probably use it again. We live in a crazy, amazing world.
- MertsA 9y agoThere's a decent chance that they might not. They've been making more and more improvements to Falcon 9 in later blocks. In particular there's been an effort to improve reusability of the later designs. Currently SpaceX is having more and more used Falcon 9s piling up. Who knows for sure, but at the moment they have no shortage of reused rockets and it's preferable to them to start using the later designs.
- hallmark 9y agoIf they're faced with a low probability landing scenario, such as the fastest re-entry velocity to date, and they need to "test" their control algorithms, which first stage would they choose? A near end-of-life used booster or a late block booster from which they would hope to get another several good launches? - assuming all others characteristics support the current launch parameters. They're amazingly deliberate in how they mingle bleeding edge R&D and commercial activity. Something that fascinates me. And rockets.
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- purpleidea 9y ago"Seems that @SpaceX often suspiciously "looses" the live video feed of landings until after success/internal review. https://youtu.be/Y8mLi-rRTh8?t=1520 https://youtu.be/Y8mLi-rRTh8?t=1520 " https://twitter.com/purpleidea/status/878473127600283648 https://twitter.com/purpleidea/status/878473127600283648
- comradesmith 9y agoTry keeping a solid satellite connection while holding your dish in your hands. Now do it on a boat, trying to compensate for waves and exhaust gases from a 27.4 tonne rocket.
- binarytransform 9y agoThis is tinfoil hat nonsense. The feed goes out for a couple of seconds due to the vibrations caused by the incoming 10-story booster retropropulsing its way to the deck. It always comes back after the rocket has shutdown.
- mikeyouse 9y agoAnd whenever they launch a NASA payload, they get the extra telemetry and video support which allows videos like this: https://youtu.be/1sJlFzUQVmY https://youtu.be/1sJlFzUQVmY
- gpm 9y agoOr you know... maintaining a high bandwidth satellite link on a barge in the ocean with three rocket engines pounding down on it is difficult and not particularly high priority. They have never not shared footage afterwards, and we've got footage all the way down live once or twice (not with a three engine landing burn mind you, since this is the first time they tried that). The man in charge of this (/u/bencredible on reddit) has also explicitly stated that it's not intentional.
- marvin 9y agoIt's always been the dodgiest landings that "accidentally" lose video coverage for the longest. I don't believe this explanation, even if it's the official account. No big criticism though; I'm super happy that they do the launch webcasts. Super exciting to watch.
- foobarbecue 9y agoAmazing how close it is to the edge to the deck. Almost missed.
- sunstone 9y agoIf you watched live the video of the landing was very patchy. In fact there was just one frame before the rocket landed and it showed the empty barge deck but a huge depression in the surface of the ocean on the other side of the barge and there was an instant and loud in take of breath by the SpaceX crowd. It really didn't look good, either the rocket had gone into the ocean there or the rocket somehow had hovered over that spot far from its expected landing zone. The video stopped again for what seemed like a long time might have been 30 seconds the next single frame showed the rocket far off center on the barge deck and there was a huge cheer from the SpaceX crew. It must have been a very close call.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI too found that particular set of frames quite interesting. So the last telemetry had stage 1 at 5700 km/sec and 22.3 km in altitude (so about 13 seconds from impact). The landing burn starts and at 24:55 "something" impacts the water really hard next to the barge. The announcer calls "landing burn has started" but you don't see any change in the telemetry (altitude or velocity) so its safe to say the downlink is still not functioning at that point). Then at 25:41 (about a minute later) we see the stage sitting on the drone ship. So once again I'm really surprised they haven't figured done something to stabilize video. Even it it were a 'drone dinghy' 500 yards off to the side holding a steady lock on a satellite or an aerial drone. The other interesting bit is at 23:42 where we see one of the grid fins in the process of burning off the side of the rocket. Then we lose downlink video from that point on with the stage. It is flying at nearly 4,000 mph at an altitude of 87,000 feet. The SR-71 goes half that fast at that altitude and experiences significant heating on its skin, since drag is proportional to the square of the velocity you're taking 4x the heating. It has to be a very fine line between burning these things up vs landing them. And clearly the more 'abuse' they will tolerate during re-entry the more fuel you can use toward lift mass. Still, I'm always surprised that they don't use more rocket power to slow down while above 100,000' to avoid the high speed re-entry and then use streamers or drogue chutes rather than RP1 to slow down in the thicker atmosphere.
- imron 9y agoThe next exciting headline will be when the reused rockets start being reused again.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alphanumeric0 9y agoSerious question, and maybe this is more for r/askengineers, but why was so much failure tolerated to successfully land a rocket upright? Is it feasible to land a rocket on its side?
- wyager 9y agoThese rockets are designed to handle longitudinal stress, not transverse stress. Making a rocket able to survive hitting the ground sideways would add way too much weight.
- will_hughes 9y agoTake a soda can, glue a lead weight to the bottom. Now scale it up to 15 stories tall. You have roughly the design of the Falcon 9 first stage. As mentioned, it's designed to take stress in one direction, when empty the vast majority of the weight is in the engines, which will make it want to fall bottom first anyway. It's not designed as a lifting body, so doing things like attaching wings would require additional reenforcement. For each 5KG you add for landing/recovery equipment/structure, you take 1KG off the maximum payload The upright landing, landing legs, and grid fins is the most efficient trade-off they've been able to come up with so far.
- alphanumeric0 9y agoVery easy to follow explanation. Thank you for the responses.
- iharhajster 9y agoNicely done, SpaceX. Keep going! And the rest of the space community. Baby steps towards cheaper lifts, Mars and beyond. Exciting times.
- milansuk 9y agoBTW next lift off is very very soon: Iridium NEXT - June 25th 20:24 UTC and they will land on boat again(Just Read The Instructions)
- vermontdevil 9y agoThen next one is July 1st - expendable though.
- LeonM 9y agoIt's a shame SpaceX never/rarely releases any of the onboard footage from the droneship. I understand that the live connection cuts out when a rocket comes down with it's engines on full thrust pointed right down at the ship, but surely the cameras on the ship store the footage. Since the landing was a particularly difficult and rough one, I'd love to see HD footage of the rocket coming in and landing on the deck of the ship. Edit: typo
- danielsamuels 9y ago> It's a shame SpaceX never/rarely releases any of the onboard footage from the droneship That's not true, usually a day or two after the landing Elon or SpaceX post the footage to Instagram and then later to YouTube.
- jpgvm 9y agoNot always, but I would say in cases like this when it's interesting (hot landing) Elon normally does come through with the goods on Instagram/Twitter.