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History-making SpaceX booster mostly destroyed in post-flight topple
- xeromal 3y ago19 flights. A pretty good run!
- jdewerd 3y ago18 more than most!
- primeelective 3y ago[flagged]
- monsecchris 3y ago[flagged]
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- anovikov 3y agoMaking rockets as reusable as airplanes necessitates many millions of flights per year, not a few hundreds. It will take a lot of time to build up enough demand. There has to be some pipeline of production which to be economical, needs to be constantly loaded, so at least a few dozen new rockets per year (airplane producers who build that little are normally balancing on the brink, it takes hundreds per year for true economy of scale). And then they need to fly thousands or at least many hundreds of times per year, each, over decades, so at least 10K times each, typically 30K or sometimes even 50K times. No less than a million total sorties per year PER PRODUCER, because an industry with just one supplier is never going to be efficient. So several million flights and maybe 50-100M tons delivered to LEO, per year, total. It's hard to see what does the humankind may need to put into orbit in quantities like that. Just for comparison, this is about as much as air cargo volumes delivered in the world.
- WalterBright 3y agoDoing a lunar base that is capable of approaching self-sufficiency would need that.
- anovikov 3y agoWho would fork the bill? How would that thing pay for itself?
- WalterBright 3y agoThe Moon has energy, raw materials, and a shallow gravity well. Hence it would be valuable for constructing and launching large spacecraft. The spacecraft would also not need to be built to withstand the stresses of an Earth launch, nor would it need to deal with weather, moisture, etc.
- holoduke 3y agoDo you know how many launches they have annually? Compare that with nasa/esa/kosmos 10 years ago. Cost per kg. Aware of that?
- echelon 3y agoDo you think you could work out all the kinks faster? They've single-handedly changed how rocketry works. They're the only ones doing anything about this. Give them some time, for goodness sake! I think they've more than demonstrated their capability. They're getting 18 launches out of these things. The previous record was 0 - 1 launches. It's an astonishing improvement, and they're getting better and better.
- wddkcs 3y agoYou can't please people sitting on the sidelines.
- Grimburger 3y ago> they fail like this It's the equivalent of a taxiing accident at an airport while going to a maintenance hanger. Not really the failure mode most care about, especially not for a retired vehicle.
- JyB 3y agoWhy does this username appear green on my screen?
- speedgoose 3y agoIt’s a recently created account.
- amethyst 3y ago> created: 14 days ago
- mlindner 3y ago> Judging them against the competition seems fair but that's not the goal post they set for themselves. Honest question, why does it seem fair to judge them against the goal they set for themselves rather than what they've achieved? To take the reverse example it means you should judge people really highly when they set really simple goals and then exceed the very simple goal. That doesn't seem very reasonable. And to be clear, that goal you're talking about is the goal of SpaceX overall, not Falcon 9 specifically. The goal for Falcon 9 this year was 100 launches. They're on track to reach 96 or 97 this year, they're at 94 so far. I don't remember any plans to give Falcon 9 airline operations, unless you go back really far (around a decade ago) when there was still plans for Falcon 9 upper stage reusability.
- quailfarmer 3y ago> failed to achieve its aim with Falcon? Yes, actually. But we aren't resting on our (very profitable) laurels. Development of Falcon slowed so attention could pivot to the new generation of even more reusable vehicles. Development on Merlin started around 2005, the first F9 was built in 2010, and first landing was in 2015. Raptor engine testing began around that time, and starship hopped in 2020. These things take time, but in truth we're right on schedule.
- WalterBright 3y agoDuring WW2, the aircraft engine makers needed to make the engines more reliable. They'd put them on a test stand, and run them at full power until they broke. They'd investigate what broke, improve it, and run the engine until the next thing broke. Etc. That's how to make things reliable. 19 cycles isn't a lot for reliability testing. I'm not a test engineer, but it'll likely take hundreds of launches to get them really solid.
- throwup238 3y agoI'm going to pour out a shot tonight. That's one hell of a run!
- bilekas 3y agoThey say high winds and heavy waves were the cause, wouldn't that kind of weather information been a critical condition of launch?
- andrewflnr 3y agoWeather at the launch site was probably quite different. I don't know the exact distance, but I assume the landing barges are a good distance downrange.
- dotnet00 3y agoThe newer boosters with auto-leveling legs would've been able to survive, and even this booster was still chained down wherever octograbber failed to secure. So it seems like they expected the risk of loss of the booster to be low, it just so happened that this time things went wrong. They have previously delayed launches due to poor weather at the barge. So if that was the case this time, they would've just postponed, unless I guess they weren't really worried about losing a life leader booster that was apparently too old to be worth retrofitting with autoleveling legs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- modeless 3y agoThey definitely do sometimes delay launches due to bad weather in the landing zone. This could have been a miscalculation, bad forecast, a mistake securing the booster, or just bad luck. Isn't it crazy that almost all of their competitors dump the whole first stage in the ocean every launch?
- bandyaboot 3y agoIt’s important to note this happened 2 days after the launch. They probably have to be somewhat liberal with what forecasted conditions are allowed during the return trip given the added uncertainty for that time span. Otherwise, they’d be having to scrub launches much more often. Pour one out for B1058 and move on, I think.
- geuis 3y agoThis specifically illustrates why SpaceX's approach to rocketry is the right way to go. They lost a booster that already had many successful launches and they have 19 more already flight proven and 3 new ones being prepared. (Apologies for that ungainly sentence.) It's definitely a loss, but not crippling in any way.
- holoduke 3y agoEngines are still intact so it seems. So not a complete loss
- grecy 3y agoJon Edwards (VP of Falcon Launch Vehicles at SpaceX) said: "We are planning to salvage the engines and do life leader inspections on the remaining hardware. There is still quite a bit of value in this booster. We will not let it go to waste." https://twitter.com/edwards345/status/1739684677714104759 https://twitter.com/edwards345/status/1739684677714104759
- mlindner 3y agoIt's literally the "SMART Reuse" (their name not mine) plan of the historical prime launch contractor in the US, United Launch Alliance (joint owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin). They plan to eject the engine section and parachute it down and then recover just the engines.
- surfpel 3y agoIt makes sense to try and accumulate "mileage" on one disproportionately more than on the others. That way, you could get learnings of long term issues (ideally) before the rest of the fleet is at risk to make necessary improvements.
- markdown 3y agoThere's a list of dead comments here helping you with your english. FYI (if you can't see them), your odd and incorrect use of "learnings" is being corrected to "lessons".
- flir 3y agoLearnings is a plural noun. Lessons is a plural noun. I'm no linguist, but... *shrug*
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- genmon 3y agoLearnings is fine. It’s a fairly typical business-speak word, I hear it a bunch.
- codeflo 3y agoYeah, what’s going on with those comments? One might argue whether “learnings” is incorrect or just stylistically bad; some dictionaries seem to list it. But why would anyone care enough to create half a dozen sock puppets to make this one point (none of them seem to have any other comments)? That seems completely insane to me.
- WalterBright 3y agoA non-native speaker friend of mine long ago would say he needed to "make some shoppings." I still tend to say that when I go shopping.
- surfpel 3y ago
- peepeepoopoo55 3y ago[flagged]
- BanMeAgainFgt 3y ago[flagged]
- EslDestroyer69 3y ago[flagged]
- EnglishMofo 3y ago[flagged]
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoThis one was so special. A bit sad but what a great invention of modern day rocketry and Elon Musk. Looking forward to many more.
- markdown 3y agoMusk didn't invent this, did he? This is like Edison getting the credit for everything invented by every employee of his company.
- WalterBright 3y agoNone of SpaceX would have happened without Musk.
- markdown 3y agoAnd? I build a chair and none of it would have happened without me, but I didn't invent this chair.
- WalterBright 3y agoNobody else in the last 100 years managed to build a reusable rocket.
- markdown 3y agoDon't move the goal posts. This is a thread about whether Musk is a rocket inventor. The US President once tasked a group of Engineers to build a rocket. The US President didn't invent the rocket.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y ago"actually inventing a rocket" and "handing billions of dollars to a swarm of engineers and thier managers, and actually getting a rocket back instead of having the shirt scammed off your back" are different skills. The latter is valuable because it's rare: ESA, Jeff Bezos, the US Senate, Richard Branson (oooooh richard branson), ULA, etc all tangibly lack it.
- DoYouSpeakIt 3y ago[flagged]
- TimeIsValuable 3y ago[flagged]
- LotsOfFreeTime 3y ago[flagged]
- English101 3y ago[flagged]
- TransLingual 3y ago[flagged]
- jfoster 3y agoWent up to space a bunch of times, but it was a boat journey that got it. That's a great win for SpaceX.
- yreg 3y agoJohn Kraus (who takes fantastic space launch pictures - @johnkrausphotos on Instagram) wrote a warm and appreciative obituary for the booster. > Falcon 9 B1058 > A portion of the record-setting Falcon 9 booster remains on board the Just Read the Instructions droneship. After its 19th launch and landing, the vehicle tipped over in rough seas during the transit back to Port Canaveral, and its top portion broke off. > On May 30, 2020, B1058 launched Demo-2, the mission that returned orbital human spaceflight to the United States after the retirement of the space shuttle. It went on to fly hundreds of Starlink satellites and other payloads into orbit over its roughly 3.5-year flight history. It brought back the iconic NASA worm logo, and in the time since became a notable and sentimental booster for much of the spaceflight community. > While its loss is disappointing, it's worth remembering that it flew 18 more missions than every expendable rocket that's ever flown, and the lessons learned from B1058 will contribute to further learnings about Falcon 9 and its recovery and reflight operations. Its 19 flights contributed to an incredible track record of over 250+ orbital class rocket landings, unparalleled by any other entity in the industry. > Hopefully some of what remains can be put on display!