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SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
- jessriedel 7y agoHere's a list that includes all their landing attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He... After their first successful drone-ship landing in April 2016, they had two failures of Falcon 9 in June 2016 and Dec 2018, two failures (of core only) on Falcon Heavy in Feb 2018 and June 2019, and 47 successful landing.
- dtparr 7y agoI believe it's 48 successful landings after the 1st as they kept mentioning today would be the 50th successful core to land. (Which counts each booster separately, including the FH side cores, but you must have been doing that too to get to 48 since the first)
- jessriedel 7y agoI'm giving the number of successful landing after the first successful drone-ship landing, which doesn't include the first successful pad landing. (This seemed a more fair way to count because drone-ship landing are harder; if you start counting after the first successful pad landing you include two failed drone ship landing which should be considered still total experiments.)
- dtparr 7y agoDammit. I read that 3 times before commenting and still missed that point of emphasis. Touché
- jessriedel 7y agoNo worries :D
- Shivetya 7y agowell it would become noteworthy that their failures make news simply because they had taken the concept of recovering the first stage to the point of people just assuming it was how rocket launches are meant to be. I remember the first video of one successfully landing after launching and being wowed but when two landed together then it truly felt like science fiction had become reality
- zanderwohl 7y agoI watched this live with a friend. We had previously watched a couple of failures, and were almost expecting that one to fail as well. We went out of our minds when the smoke cleared and the booster was upright. It does feel annoying when rocket launches, which are enormously complex, go right and get no press, but surface in the news when they explode or fail in some way. By most standards, this launch was perfectly successful, but every time the first stages crash the press treats this like some kind of major failure.
- scrumbledober 7y agoimportant to note that by any other launch provider's standards this was a perfect launch. Payload was inserted into the correct orbit, no one else even attempts to recover the booster.
- speedgoose 7y agoHowever it's important to note that recovering the first stage makes sense only if it's successful enough times. Because it reduces the payload and it's more expensive as a single use.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gibolt 7y ago>1 is enough times for an individual booster. Some failures are ok, as long as the average is >~1.2
- bolasanibk 7y agoSpaceX has made landing so routine that now failed landings are news.
- tomp 7y agoI wonder if they're deliberate? Like if you're 100% you can land in "normal" circumstances, maybe try perturbing the parameters or input data a bit... to stress-test your algos, as if simulating wind, earthquake, different planet's gravity, different atmosphere, different rocket, engine failure...
- shadowgovt 7y agoBased on the seas today as seen from the drone-ship camera, I wouldn't be surprised if they're willing to launch in conditions sub-optimal for recovery (but sufficient for launch) because the data they gather from a launch failure is still valuable and hitting a launch window is worth more to them than missing it and recovering stage 1. Not quite the same as intentionally launching to crash, but it has a notional morphism to the site-reliability-engineering concept of "burning your error budget on a high-reliability system to satisfy other tradeoffs."
- cowmix 7y agoNow that these are used to launch their own cargo (no not paid launches) I'm sure every loss hits them hard.
- DennisP 7y agoA failure on launch would hit them harder, but a failure landing the empty rocket costs the same as it always did, assuming they've got enough spare capacity to keep up the launch schedule.
- TheNorthman 7y agoThe payload is smaller and they're more expensive than single-use. It's cheaper if they land it multiple times, which they have. I'm not aware of the actual ratio they need to hit, although I'm sure they are.
- xt00 7y agoI believe they do a little horizontal kick just before landing when they validate things are look good. Potentially something wasn’t right and it just crashed into the ocean like 100 yards from the drone ship.. the good thing is that spaceX seems to learn from all of these issues and compensates, so will be interesting to here what happened.
- clutchingstraws 7y agoThis is accurate. More good examples of this passive-safety landing procedure in action were in the Heavy demo flight and the CRS-16 mission. The Heavy demo center core failed to relight two of the three engines needed for landing, and plunged right into the water off the side of the landing barge (https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?t=72 https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?t=72). CRS-16's booster had a hydraulic failure of the grid fins but still had engine and RCS control, so it was able to make a soft water splashdown at the last second (dramatic video from the booster's perspective is here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070399755526656000 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070399755526656000).
- Denvercoder9 7y agoIf I remember correctly this procedure was implemented after SES-9, which came in too hot and broke straight through the deck of the droneship.
- greglindahl 7y agoI'm pretty sure it pre-dates the first landing, it's an important safety feature when aiming the booster at land.
- clutchingstraws 7y agoI didn't know that. Thanks for the detail. Better to lose a booster than both lose a booster and cripple a droneship. On that topic, I've always been impressed at how tough those droneships are. They've taken a lot of punishment but they've never lost one at sea yet. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of the first meeting between reps from SpaceX and McDonough Marine. "So, you folks make big rockets. I'm guessing you're going to need these barges to transport them around to avoid roads. And there's likely some insurance implications here." "In that order: yes, technically yes, and definitely yes."
- chrisjc 7y agoI recall that the last landing had an unusually hard touchdown. https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=1188 https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=1188
- foota 7y agoMaybe they're trying to cut the fuel they take closer to the limit?
- fauxrockpet 7y agoWhen are people gonna start talking about the elephant in the room? There is no publicly available data that points to reusable rockets being safe for human return.
- martindevans 7y agoThere hasn't been a single failure of a reused falcon 9 booster on launch, which is the bit relevant to human spaceflight. Humans aren't going to ride a falcon 9 down to landing. If you're talking about starship then I'm not sure how worthwhile extrapolating from F9 is. I would guess they're pushing F9 to its limits here - after all a small gain in launch efficiency multiplied by the size of the StarLink constellation is a big overall improvement!
- fauxrockpet 7y agoI'm talking about extrapolating from any rocket launch. Sorry if I'm not clear, but I am talking about starship.
- jacquesm 7y agoNobody is trying to land humans on the reusable part of the rocket, this is the first stage returning under power. There is no elephant in the room, there is no room and no elephant either, so a lack of data is the expectation, not something worth mentioning.
- fauxrockpet 7y agoSpacex plans to land humans on a reusable part of the rocket with the stardip.
- jacquesm 7y agoStardip? They also plan to make a trip to Mars. SpaceX has a lot of stuff on the drawing board and may or may not execute on any of that. For now what you have is a two stage to orbit vehicle that can be topped with a man rated capsule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#NASA_Commercial_Crew_Development_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#NASA_Commercial_... Good old 'parachute & splashdown'. Starship is - for now - mostly fiction with some parts under test, if and when they plan to do their second stage controlled and re-usable landings you can be sure there have been very large numbers of landings without mishap or SpaceX will blow all their credit in one RUD. So let's wait until it is 'on topic' before spouting off, there are plenty of possible reasons why this landing could have been aborted, a very large number of those possible reasons hinge on the state of the drone ship (platform stability, for instance) which might have worked just fine if the landing had been attempted over land on a pad.
- Simulacra 7y agothe fact that a failed landing makes more headlines nowadays is pretty damn impressive
- krm01 7y agoI remember seeing the first landing. I thought it was some fake footage. Glad to see they progressed so rapidly that a relatively minor failure becomes news.
- jacquesm 7y agoPlease all keep in mind that the primary mission is a success and that landing the booster is an optimization, not a failure if it does not work. A failure is when the primary mission fails, everything else is a success.
- ogre_codes 7y agoAlso worth keeping in mind: Every other launch system out there "Fails" to recover their first stage on every single launch. SpaceX "Failing" here is reverting to norm.
- jacquesm 7y agoNot quite, they re-flew this particular booster 3 times after the initial launch. Reverting to the norm would be a crash after the first flight. Makes you wonder what the maximum life expectancy is for these boosters.
- zionic 7y agoAlso: 1) This was this particular booster's 4th flight 2) This particular orbit was stated to be at the very edge of F9's performance.
- fsh 7y agoTrying to recover the first stage significantly reduces available payload.
- apendleton 7y agoThat's probably not significant for Starlink specifically, as they're constrained by fairing volume rather than maximum payload mass (which is to say: even if they weren't recovering the booster, they wouldn't be able to increase the number of satellites).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- OrgNet 7y ago
- nathandaly 7y agoThis was the fourth mission for this first stage booster, which is the most any core has launched yet, is that right?
- vermontdevil 7y agoYes. No core has done 5 launches yet.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's just a matter of time though. The rate they are going up it will probably happen this year.
- vermontdevil 7y agoI read they plan one of the next few starlink launches to be a fifth reflight booster.
- pavon 7y agoYes, one other core has done four missions (the last Starlink launch I believe). It successfully landed.
- vermontdevil 7y agoStarlink launches are heavy and I wonder pushing the envelope reduces the margin of error. The last successful barge landing with Starlink crushed the leg core as it came in hot and heavy. I’m sure these tough landings will help SpaceX.
- shadowgovt 7y agoI'm hoping we get an info-dump into the public channel on the nature of the recovery failure. Footage from the drone ship before they cut away due to no landing to show indicated the sea had larger swells than I remember seeing on previous attempts and some water striking the camera lens from somewhere. I wonder if they aborted the landing because they couldn't guarantee the drone would have the right attitude to receive the rocket at time of touchdown?
- bryanlarsen 7y agoPerhaps apocryphal, but: "You learn more from one failure than from ten successes" - Von Braun "I'd rather have ten successes" - Elon Musk
- anorphirith 7y agothis shouldn't be news. this isn't news