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Plan never was to retrieve this one. It was to simulate a landing, but over the ocean and then sink. That looks like it happened successfully... of course we'

Plan never was to retrieve this one. It was to simulate a landing, but over the ocean and then sink. That looks like it happened successfully... of course we'll need to wait to hear if it actually did things like hover in the right spot, etc. But looked pretty good; despite what looked like some issues with engine lights.

arrowsmith 2y ago
Is there a better video then the one in the link? 90% of the screen in this one is taken up by the ocean and it's not clear at all what is happening.
- db48x 2y ago
  It made a vertical “landing” burn and touched down on the surface of the ocean. Then it fell over, for the obvious reasons. How was that not clear?
lupusreal 2y ago
I wonder what happens to it now. Does the USN scoop it up or do they wait for some other navy's submarine to start prying at that sweet ITAR hardware?
- creshal 2y ago
  There isn't much to be gained from mangled, corroded remains of what used to be ITAR hardware at some point, so nobody really tried it before. All the Apollo engines e.g. are still where they were dropped (unless recovered by the US), because you'd really need to abduct a few of the designers or engineers involved to gain useful insights.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    I think you're definitely wrong about that. It's generally believed that the US Navy puts a lot of effort into picking scraps of foreign missile tests up off the ocean floor, to see what they can learn. Hard to confirm from unclassified sources, but I believe it.
    - creshal 2y ago
      You're wrong about why the US Navy is doing that. They don't care about how those missiles were manufactured, they want to figure out what their performance is – what's their real fuel capacity, their real fuel efficiency, their real turn rates, etc. pp., to figure out how dangerous they are, and how they're best intercepted. Whatever the official performance figures are, they're guaranteed to be wrong (either exaggerated to scare enemies, or downplayed to lure enemies into a false sense of security). None of that applies to civilian rockets. ITAR regulates them because exporting either the finished rockets, or their components, or the tools and processes used to make them, might help foreign powers build their own. Salvaging wrecks isn't very useful for that. Meanwhile, if you want to know the exact performance figures for those rockets, you can just look them up on the manufacturers' websites. Nobody has any reason to lie about them; if you exaggerate them, customers will find out quickly, and if you downplay them, customers won't buy it. This is why the Chinese and Russians (and before them, Soviets) tend to keep "fishing trawlers" full of SIGINT and recovery gear around NATO missile exercises, but not civilian launches. They care just as much about NATO military missile performance as the USN cares about their own. (And both sides rely on good old industrial espionage to copy manufacturing technology.)

arrowsmith 2y ago

Is there a better video then the one in the link? 90% of the screen in this one is taken up by the ocean and it's not clear at all what is happening.

db48x 2y ago
It made a vertical “landing” burn and touched down on the surface of the ocean. Then it fell over, for the obvious reasons. How was that not clear?

lupusreal 2y ago

I wonder what happens to it now. Does the USN scoop it up or do they wait for some other navy's submarine to start prying at that sweet ITAR hardware?

creshal 2y ago
There isn't much to be gained from mangled, corroded remains of what used to be ITAR hardware at some point, so nobody really tried it before. All the Apollo engines e.g. are still where they were dropped (unless recovered by the US), because you'd really need to abduct a few of the designers or engineers involved to gain useful insights.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  I think you're definitely wrong about that. It's generally believed that the US Navy puts a lot of effort into picking scraps of foreign missile tests up off the ocean floor, to see what they can learn. Hard to confirm from unclassified sources, but I believe it.
  - creshal 2y ago
    You're wrong about why the US Navy is doing that. They don't care about how those missiles were manufactured, they want to figure out what their performance is – what's their real fuel capacity, their real fuel efficiency, their real turn rates, etc. pp., to figure out how dangerous they are, and how they're best intercepted. Whatever the official performance figures are, they're guaranteed to be wrong (either exaggerated to scare enemies, or downplayed to lure enemies into a false sense of security). None of that applies to civilian rockets. ITAR regulates them because exporting either the finished rockets, or their components, or the tools and processes used to make them, might help foreign powers build their own. Salvaging wrecks isn't very useful for that. Meanwhile, if you want to know the exact performance figures for those rockets, you can just look them up on the manufacturers' websites. Nobody has any reason to lie about them; if you exaggerate them, customers will find out quickly, and if you downplay them, customers won't buy it. This is why the Chinese and Russians (and before them, Soviets) tend to keep "fishing trawlers" full of SIGINT and recovery gear around NATO missile exercises, but not civilian launches. They care just as much about NATO military missile performance as the USN cares about their own. (And both sides rely on good old industrial espionage to copy manufacturing technology.)