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A helicopter will try to catch a rocket booster mid-air
- mbostleman 5y agoNot with me in it.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y agoThanks for clarifying; When I first saw the headline I wasn't sure whether you'd be inside or not.
- sslayer 5y agoHas nobody thought to slap a set of retractable wings on them, and turn them into remote controlled gliders?
- gameswithgo 5y ago
- imtringued 5y agoThat's completely over-engineered. You just need inflatable floats and then the helicopter can pick the booster up within minutes to prevent salt water corrosion.
- thinkcontext 5y agoThey have done recoveries from the ocean, so they have rejected that option.
- Someone 5y ago“The first stage burns out after the first 70 km”. There’s very little atmosphere there, so it would effectively free fall for a while first, and then would have to start gliding. You can’t rapidly get from a fast free fall (almost vertical) to gliding (almost horizontal), or your wings will break of. That means you either need something to rapidly (but not too rapidly) decrease vertical speed, or you need lots of height to make a slow turn (this thing will be falling at thousands of km/hour before it reaches denser atmosphere). I guess “lots of height” is a bit more than 70km for realistically strong wings. So, you need something to decrease vertical speed. A parachute is the best solution we have for that. If you have that, why add wings, too? If you launch to orbit, there is a gliding solution that will work: wait for atmospheric drag to slowly bring the booster down to denser atmosphere, but these boosters don’t get into orbit, and even if they did, it would take way too long.
- avmich 5y ago> I guess “lots of height” is a bit more than 70km for realistically strong wings. A drop test of Dream Chaser prototype was done a few years ago from a helicopter, definitely not 70 km of altitude. The prototype successfully landed onto a landing strip.
- Someone 5y agoI maybe mistaken, but I don’t see how that’s relevant. Dream chaser is designed to return from orbit. These boosters won’t reach anything like orbit, and will have insufficient horizontal speed to start gliding. Also, if you want to glide these boosters to earth, the challenge is to get them into more dense atmosphere with a low vertical speed. Once you’re there, it’s ‘easy’. A test dropping them from a helicopter doesn’t test the ability to do that at all; it tests the ability to land after you’ve done that.
- thinkcontext 5y agoPeople have thought of it. I recall a Soviet design that would have put wings on the strap-on boosters. Wings are heavy, a parachute is lighter. Every pound added is many pounds less payload.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trhway 5y agoHard to not wonder about success of combining 2 least robust technologies. All the luck to them. Who knows where the true disruption happens.
- tantalor 5y agoWonder no more, this was proven to work over 60 years ago. > As long ago as 1960, the U.S. Air Force snagged a returning capsule from a mission called Discoverer 14
- bpodgursky 5y agoThat was a capsule; look at the size of this relative to the aircraft — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_14#/media/File:Fairchild_C-119J_Flying_Boxcar_recovers_CORONA_Capsule_1960_USAF_040314-O-9999R-001.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_14#/media/File:Fair... A first-stage booster is order(s?) of magnitude larger.
- thinkcontext 5y agoThey have tested catching a dropped mockup version multiple times.
- Johnny555 5y agoI suspect that this will only be a viable procedure until the inevitable accident that causes a helicopter crash, then it will be deemed too risky for regular use (unless the helicopter can be unmanned)
- trothamel 5y agoSomething very similar (capturing space capsules) was done regularly from the 1960s to the 1980s, so it's not like there isn't precedent for this.
- hutzlibu 5y agoBut that was in military context, with higher risk tolerance to loss of human life. (for getting intel, way more dangerous methods are applied all the time)
- gameswithgo 5y ago
- samwillis 5y agoWhile you are probably technically right, I think you are over estimating the risks involved. The booster will be under a parachute, travelling relatively slowly, and there will clearly be many safety precautions and features involved. They will certainly have a stringent check list before proceeding with the attempt as well as some sort of fail safe cutting of the lies if something goes wrong. I would expect the chance of a serious accident to be very low. Also keep in mind these sort of mid air captures were well practiced by the US during the Cold War to capture returning photographic film from spy satellites. Although that was with airplanes not helicopters. A variation of it is actually shown at the end of James Bond Thunderball where he and the girl are rescued from a life raft via a balloon and capturing plane.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoLow as it may be, it seems like an unreasonable risk, given the recent advancements in pilotless (and remotely piloted) aircraft.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI could be wrong, but I though SpaceX catches its entire rocket (all stages) now with rafts/boats, doesn't it? What does this add over that already-implemented system? Wouldn't blimps be a far better tech to keep the net aloft?
- marcusverus 5y agoMaybe they're afraid of Blue Origin? BO has a patent that covers "Sea landing of space launch vehicles and associated systems and methods"[0]. Of course, BO sued SpaceX and lost, so I'm not sure that they could win against Rocket Labs. [0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US8678321B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8678321B2/en
- frederikvs 5y agoSpaceX's first stage lands itself, either on a droneship or on a landing pad near the launch site. The payload fairings splash down in the ocean, and get fished up for reuse. The second stage is not recovered. Rocket lab just has a different approach to the same problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 5y agoFor some mission profiles, SpaceX boosters land right back where they took off. Neat as can be. Here's a photo capturing launch and landing at Cape Canaveral in the same view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Zones_1_and_2#/media/File:ORBCOMM-2_First-Stage_Landing_(23604164970).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Zones_1_and_2#/media/F...
- zardo 5y agoWell, they return to a landing pad within a few hundred yards of where they took off. A difference worth pointing out because the plan for their next generation rocket is to actually return directly to the launch site.
- 5y ago
- graupel 5y agoMany years ago I was at Dugway Proving Ground when NASA was supposed to catch the Genesis Space Probe under parachute with "hollywood stunt pilots" flying A-Star helicopters with long probes mounted on the front, to hook the parachute in mid-air. It all would have worked out swimmingly if the parachute on the Genesis would have opened, but an installation error caused it not to and for the probe to smash into the ground, leaving some very confused and disappointed helicopter pilots, among others. Space is hard.
- aasarava 5y agoHey, I was there, too! It was a long way to go to end up watching the catch attempt on monitors in a hangar. If I remember correctly, the problem was that the deceleration sensors were drawn upside down.
- hackeraccount 5y ago"hollywood stunt pilots" was clearly the best part of that entire story; like you could write a novel or a screenplay using that and adding "space probe" and "catching" to it.
- chasd00 5y agoI wonder if they’re using a steerable parachute to put it on a predictable heading. In the rocketry hobby we use the drogue/main deployment to keep from having to walk so far to collect a rocket. Naturally, someone put an acrobatic parachute, gps, microcontroller, and some actuators in an airframe to fly a model rocket back to the launch rail. It worked pretty well. https://youtu.be/4ac-VFPAqIo https://youtu.be/4ac-VFPAqIo
- maxerickson 5y agoThey have a demo video showing a helicopter catching a booster dropped from a second helicopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CWGDhkmbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CWGDhkmbs (from https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/electron/ https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/electron/ ) The parachuting booster falls at 10 meters per second from 6000 meters, so they've got a pretty tight window. The helicopter has a ceiling of 4300 meters and can cover about 3 km a minute, so you've got a couple minutes after the chute deploys to get to the closest safe distance when the booster is still above the helicopter and then about 5 minutes to catch it once the helicopter is above it.
- Animats 5y agoThey already have a parachute on the booster. Why not steer the parachute and land on land? The US military has been using automatically guided steerable parachutes for over a decade.[1] The current JPADS system has both GPS and visual guidance, so they can drop a load from a high altitude and land on target. There's a commercial version.[2] Maybe land on a target of crushable cardboard. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_CFv2MT7gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_CFv2MT7gM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A3PfDfzYEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A3PfDfzYEM
- Tepix 5y agoThe delicate rockets engines would likely be damaged
- nerb 5y agoprobably due to the horizontal distance it would have to traverse to get back to land (and uncontrollable factors that would limit that, e.g. wind magnitude and direction during launch). your sources don't give an overview of how far those parachutes can glide, but it feels like they are deployed relatively close to their intended touchdown point.
- boredpudding 5y agoThe rocket is hundreds of kilometers away from land at that moment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dkbrk 5y ago1. Constraining the first stage to return over land would massively impact payload. This would be even worse than a Falcon 9 RTLS, because at least with that it can do a boostback, so the 2nd stage is still put on a relatively flat trajectory, just with earlier stage separation. 2. SpaceX tried using steerable parachutes for fairing recovery. Turns out, accurate enough to hit a small clearing for air-delivering supplies still has enough error that if you want to land it on some soft target, that target has to be very large. Larger than you think. The accuracy of GPS isn't the problem; parachutes are difficult to control with only a few degrees of freedom in control and are at the mercy of the wind. 3. A "target of crushable cardboard" absolutely wouldn't work. Since Electron's first stage is so light, I could believe some sort of large net, elevated above the ground could work. Probably cable-supported, with some sort of buffer on the cables to bring the net to a stop after the rocket lands on it. But that would be big and expensive. 4. A few hours of helicopter time is actually pretty cheap, especially compared to the alternatives. And catching things with a helicopter may not be common, but it is a proven technique with plenty of history behind it. And there's no shortage of very, very capable helicopter pilots able to accomplish such a feat.