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I 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 q

I 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 ago
Yeah people seem to be getting used to it everywhere, on many forums too. And this is obviously the goal.
syngrog66 9y ago
also is late Friday night, here in most of US
fatherzeus 9y ago
When 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 ago
Well 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 ago
  Anyword on the second stage? I know they're also working on getting those to land as well.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    It 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 ago
      Not 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 ago
    They'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 ago
    Landing 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.
  - grkvlt 9y ago
    Interestingly, now that SpaceX has the X-37 contract, there is the possibility of launching and recovering a re-used first stage and payload, but not the second stage! I guess this almost happened with the Dragon that contained a re-used pressure vessel, but not-quite.
- phs2501 9y ago
  It'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 ago
Gotta 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 ago
When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Paraphrased Asimov.
babyrainbow 9y ago
or may be people are realizing that this was not really a big deal in the first place.....
- binarytransform 9y ago
  Yeah we should go back to following the jitney cab news.
- imron 9y ago
  Haha, 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 ago
      This 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 ago
      Note 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 ago
Be 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    The 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 ago
    I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I'm pretty sure the networks jumped on Apollo 13 pretty quickly given what happened.

johnnydoe9 9y ago

Yeah people seem to be getting used to it everywhere, on many forums too. And this is obviously the goal.

syngrog66 9y ago

also is late Friday night, here in most of US

fatherzeus 9y ago

When 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 ago

Well 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 ago
Anyword on the second stage? I know they're also working on getting those to land as well.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  It 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 ago
    Not 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 ago
  They'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 ago
  Landing 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.
- grkvlt 9y ago
  Interestingly, now that SpaceX has the X-37 contract, there is the possibility of launching and recovering a re-used first stage and payload, but not the second stage! I guess this almost happened with the Dragon that contained a re-used pressure vessel, but not-quite.
phs2501 9y ago
It'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 ago

Gotta 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 ago

When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Paraphrased Asimov.

babyrainbow 9y ago

or may be people are realizing that this was not really a big deal in the first place.....

binarytransform 9y ago
Yeah we should go back to following the jitney cab news.
imron 9y ago
Haha, 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 ago
    This 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 ago
    Note 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 ago

Be 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 ago
The 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  I 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 ago

I 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 ago
I'm pretty sure the networks jumped on Apollo 13 pretty quickly given what happened.