7 ms·

Falcon 9 first stage found, but probably not recoverable

103 points by cryptoz 13y ago

XorNot 13y ago
Damn. Here's hoping they feel confident enough about their guidance to try a land touchdown next time.
- msandford 13y ago
  If it were me I'd probably try and get an old oil rig that's headed for the scrap yard and put a large, uniform platform on it and try and land on that. If something goes terribly wrong it will happen 20 miles from anything. The majority of rigs don't bob, they either sit on the ocean floor or they're tethered down so the up and down motion that would happen when they're free is actually translated into more or less tension in the anchor cables. I was thinking "barge" at first but if the seas were rough it'd get tossed about and make landing a disaster. EDIT: It would probably cost millions for all the steel even at salvage value, but that's probably a lot cheaper than the insurance (if you can even buy it) for having a reusable rocket come back over land and attempt a landing, however remote the location.
  - Justsignedup 13y ago
    We still have the primary problem: If it hits a town (due to any error, such as an unforeseen destruction of a component) the human casualty would be a disaster. It's not even just the $$. A barge would not work because it is mobile as well. This is indeed rocket science.
    - mpg33 13y ago
      Couldn't that happen as it's going up as well?
      - nickff 13y ago
        This is precisely why SpaceX needs to be granted permission to close down the beach in Texas (if they are to make a launch site there).
    - extropy 13y ago
      That's why they have range safety. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety. Basically a remote self-destruct trigger with multiple redundant data channels and possibly a self destruct on communication loss. You will get some debris but the damage is lot more predictable than a full stage coming down.
      - 001sky 13y ago
        Isn't the issue that 'range safety' isn't really a landing feature? Look at the shuttle strewn out over texas. Range safety is fine for launch (when you have control over initial trajectory and location); or for a test-flight that is retsricted to and actual missle range (or other restricted airspace).
        ceejayoz 13y ago
        The Shuttle had to reenter over populated areas (and didn't hit anyone, anyways). The SpaceX first stages will be returning from over water, and targeting a beachfront pad, so if it's coming towards land too fast for comfort you can just drop the debris into the water.
        Crito 13y ago
        I am not sure what you mean. The Space Shuttle Orbiter did not have range safety. Range safety played no role in the Columbia disaster.
        001sky 13y ago
        The space shuttle has range safety, but only during launch. The shuttle launches over the ocean, which allows for 'range safety' to be implemented, on the SRBs and EFT. Since the shuttle's re-entry flightpath is not constrained to restricted airspace, destroying the shuttle orbiter deliberately would only be "range safety" in the loosest sense. Empirical data seem to suggest Columbia began to self-destruct over the CA/AZ border before landing in a debris field scattered over (populated) west Texas. As seen from an actual destructive episode, the debris path/cone was extensive, and unlikely to be constrained to air-space designated for such purposes. The issues about how to mitigate this problem comes down to some of the things noted in at least one other comment here--basically SpaceX would limit the re-entry flight-path to open-ocean during approach. Even then, the question is about ballistic "backstop"/shadow of its landing site ("the beach"). These are pretty basic questions about the size and nature of the landing facility and the ballistic match of un-guided (and potentially un-aerodynamic) debris based upon whatever the realistic assumptions of velocity/altitude and response time of the system are.
    - AYBABTME 13y ago
      There's not much fuel left in the tank at that point. Surely it would be bad, but I don't think the damages would extend to a very large area.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        The empty weight of a Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 tons. It would be vaguely comparable to a DC-9 crash with little fuel left in the tanks. Not quite as bad, as it's lighter (DC-9 is about 22 tons empty) and considerably less dense. So it would be a "take out a couple of houses" event if it hit the wrong spot, I think, but nothing much worse than that.
    - rst 13y ago
      Some outside observers' current best guess about mitigating this danger is to have the returning boost stage initially aim for water just off-shore, which leaves time to destroy it in the air if it winds up off-course. If things look good, they can then use the landing burn to divert from just off-shore to just on-shore. FWIW, they haven't announced anything specific about range safety management, but the "Grasshopper" landing test rig was seen rehearsing such a horizontal diversion on one of its last flights. (As to the barge, its being mobile is a feature, not a bug: they could tow it to whatever spot at sea needs the least fuel to get to after stage separation. The problems are that the barge itself may not stay level during landing, and that the rocket exhaust from even a single throttled-down engine is still likely to burn a hole in a barge.)
  - fixermark 13y ago
    I love this idea. One challenge I can imagine is that it'll be more expensive to ship the stage back to land by barge for refuelling / refurbish and relaunch. Given that land is still pretty cheap in the USA, it's probably the case that it'll be overall less expensive to just buy up whatever they need for a "Cape Canaveral 2."
    - washedup 13y ago
      The launch trajectories they follow when launching from Cape Canaveral don't allow them to buy land for the First Stage further down from the launch site. Many launches occur at Cape Canaveral because they allow for a safe trajectory over open water, where people are less likely to be hurt in case of unexpected performance.
    - msandford 13y ago
      I would buy it for a couple of tests and once the systems have been proven to work go ahead and scrap the rig. The idea here is that initially there are many things that could go wrong and you want to make it safe for those things to go wrong, even very badly. Once the bugs have been worked out (if there are any) then you start bringing it back over land. The tricky part isn't going from 2m/s down to fully stopped and stationary on a launch pad, although I'm sure that's not easy. It's making sure you're completely in control through a whole bunch of maneuvers to transition from heading up very fast to heading back down at a moderate pace to a slowly descending hover. During some of those parts of flight you'll be moving very quickly to where a small sensor lag or instability could make differences measured in miles rather than inches. By putting the whole thing out to sea you eliminate huge swathes of risk be it human life, financial, PR, whatever. Even if you only did one rig landing and it worked you would gain huge confidence in the systems and you could potentially refuel it on the rig to some amount and fly it back to "base"
  - pbreit 13y ago
    Isn't the intention to launch from the west coast where the booster would come down on land?
    - stackcollision 13y ago
      I have not heard about a west coast launch pad, but I was wondering how they planned to actually accomplish the landing. We (almost) always launch west-to-east, to take advantage of the roughly 400m/s you gain from the Earth's rotation. It wouldn't make sense to launch from the east coast and then have the boost fly back to get to land.
      - washedup 13y ago
        There are many launches from Vandenberg AFB, but most of these launches will travel south over the Pacific. It is generally used for placing payloads in Polar orbits. They never launch over land for fear or casualties if something goes wrong.
        lutusp 13y ago
        > They never launch over land for fear or casualties if something goes wrong. Yes, that's true now, but at the height of the Shuttle program, Vandenberg AFB had begun to build, and planned to use, a Shuttle launch facility. So that's a policy change, because there was a time when they were more than willing to launch something very heavy over land to their east.
        sputknick 13y ago
        That launch facility was for polar orbiting shuttle missions, which were never executed.
        timdiggerm 13y ago
        Source for saying it would be exclusively used for polar missions?
- cdash 13y ago
  They won't be, they are doing another ocean landing in like 4 weeks. But hopefully sometime this year.
  - extropy 13y ago
    Next launch will be to geostationary orbit. More fuel is needed to get there, I'm not sure if they have enough left for a boost-back.
    - Crito 13y ago
      Where did you get this information? As far as I can tell, the next launch is is for Orbcomm and should be to LEO. The last two GTO launches did not have reusability test burns because SpaceX was contractually obliged to use all of their delta-v getting the satellites into a highly elliptical orbit (which would allow the satellites to use less of their fuel for the inclination change, thus extending their lifespan). As far as I know, SpaceX only agreed to these sort of terms for those two GTO launches and future GTO launches will still include reusability burn tests.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
RALaBarge 13y ago
The fact that SpaceX has come so far in such a short time is amazing. I am quite confident that they will overcome any technical challenges RE: re-usable first stages
- holecene 13y ago
  SpaceX is rapidly turning into AM&M from 'The Rocket Company'[0]. [0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1563476967 http://www.amazon.com/The-Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1...
outworlder 13y ago
That's to be expected. But they got some very valuable data out of it.
astrowilliam 13y ago
This is an absolutely incredible feat of engineering and science. GO SPACEX!
Arjuna 13y ago
The article reports that the first stage achieved a near zero velocity landing. Another critical marker that was achieved, which is closely related, is that the first stage's flight dynamics (i.e., pitch, roll and yaw) were correct. Previously, the first stage was destroyed because the flight dynamics were incorrect. Also, the first stage continued to report telemetry for 8 seconds after the water landing. Does anyone know if the first stage's landing legs were successfully deployed before the water landing? These are the 4 carbon fiber and aluminum legs (each 25ft / 7.6m long) that would be used to land the stage. I know that Falcon 9 launched with them, but I don't know if they were deployed. My suspicion is that they would have attempted to deploy them as well, for verification and validation purposes.
- Patrick_Devine 13y ago
  SpaceX hasn't confirmed it, however I would assume that that would be the case. Elon has stated in the past that the legs would provide pitch stability which was missing in the last attempt to relight the first stage. Without it the first stage likely would tumble and a relight would be impossible due to the propellant being centrifuged. Here's a link which talks about it (about halfway through the article): http://www.space.com/23009-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-test-first-person.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AutoSpaceNews+%28Automated+Space+News%29 http://www.space.com/23009-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-tes...
nealabq 13y ago
For launches over land, how about landing in a lake instead of the ocean? It'd be easier to find, and salt water is corrosive.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  If you're confident enough that you can safely bring the rocket back over land to a target location like a lake, you might as well land it on the ground. The reason these stages land in the ocean is because it's a big safe place to drop a piece of metal you don't have control of.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I doubt they care about corrosion. None of the water-landed first stages will actually be reused.
cmapes 13y ago
Quick correction to the article: Gwynne Shotwell is not the President & CEO, she is the President & COO. It's very well known that Elon Musk is the CEO.

103 points by cryptoz 13y ago

XorNot 13y ago

Damn. Here's hoping they feel confident enough about their guidance to try a land touchdown next time.

msandford 13y ago
If it were me I'd probably try and get an old oil rig that's headed for the scrap yard and put a large, uniform platform on it and try and land on that. If something goes terribly wrong it will happen 20 miles from anything. The majority of rigs don't bob, they either sit on the ocean floor or they're tethered down so the up and down motion that would happen when they're free is actually translated into more or less tension in the anchor cables. I was thinking "barge" at first but if the seas were rough it'd get tossed about and make landing a disaster. EDIT: It would probably cost millions for all the steel even at salvage value, but that's probably a lot cheaper than the insurance (if you can even buy it) for having a reusable rocket come back over land and attempt a landing, however remote the location.
- Justsignedup 13y ago
  We still have the primary problem: If it hits a town (due to any error, such as an unforeseen destruction of a component) the human casualty would be a disaster. It's not even just the $$. A barge would not work because it is mobile as well. This is indeed rocket science.
  - mpg33 13y ago
    Couldn't that happen as it's going up as well?
    - nickff 13y ago
      This is precisely why SpaceX needs to be granted permission to close down the beach in Texas (if they are to make a launch site there).
  - extropy 13y ago
    That's why they have range safety. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety. Basically a remote self-destruct trigger with multiple redundant data channels and possibly a self destruct on communication loss. You will get some debris but the damage is lot more predictable than a full stage coming down.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      Isn't the issue that 'range safety' isn't really a landing feature? Look at the shuttle strewn out over texas. Range safety is fine for launch (when you have control over initial trajectory and location); or for a test-flight that is retsricted to and actual missle range (or other restricted airspace).
      - ceejayoz 13y ago
        The Shuttle had to reenter over populated areas (and didn't hit anyone, anyways). The SpaceX first stages will be returning from over water, and targeting a beachfront pad, so if it's coming towards land too fast for comfort you can just drop the debris into the water.
      - Crito 13y ago
        I am not sure what you mean. The Space Shuttle Orbiter did not have range safety. Range safety played no role in the Columbia disaster.
        001sky 13y ago
        The space shuttle has range safety, but only during launch. The shuttle launches over the ocean, which allows for 'range safety' to be implemented, on the SRBs and EFT. Since the shuttle's re-entry flightpath is not constrained to restricted airspace, destroying the shuttle orbiter deliberately would only be "range safety" in the loosest sense. Empirical data seem to suggest Columbia began to self-destruct over the CA/AZ border before landing in a debris field scattered over (populated) west Texas. As seen from an actual destructive episode, the debris path/cone was extensive, and unlikely to be constrained to air-space designated for such purposes. The issues about how to mitigate this problem comes down to some of the things noted in at least one other comment here--basically SpaceX would limit the re-entry flight-path to open-ocean during approach. Even then, the question is about ballistic "backstop"/shadow of its landing site ("the beach"). These are pretty basic questions about the size and nature of the landing facility and the ballistic match of un-guided (and potentially un-aerodynamic) debris based upon whatever the realistic assumptions of velocity/altitude and response time of the system are.
  - AYBABTME 13y ago
    There's not much fuel left in the tank at that point. Surely it would be bad, but I don't think the damages would extend to a very large area.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      The empty weight of a Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 tons. It would be vaguely comparable to a DC-9 crash with little fuel left in the tanks. Not quite as bad, as it's lighter (DC-9 is about 22 tons empty) and considerably less dense. So it would be a "take out a couple of houses" event if it hit the wrong spot, I think, but nothing much worse than that.
  - rst 13y ago
    Some outside observers' current best guess about mitigating this danger is to have the returning boost stage initially aim for water just off-shore, which leaves time to destroy it in the air if it winds up off-course. If things look good, they can then use the landing burn to divert from just off-shore to just on-shore. FWIW, they haven't announced anything specific about range safety management, but the "Grasshopper" landing test rig was seen rehearsing such a horizontal diversion on one of its last flights. (As to the barge, its being mobile is a feature, not a bug: they could tow it to whatever spot at sea needs the least fuel to get to after stage separation. The problems are that the barge itself may not stay level during landing, and that the rocket exhaust from even a single throttled-down engine is still likely to burn a hole in a barge.)
- fixermark 13y ago
  I love this idea. One challenge I can imagine is that it'll be more expensive to ship the stage back to land by barge for refuelling / refurbish and relaunch. Given that land is still pretty cheap in the USA, it's probably the case that it'll be overall less expensive to just buy up whatever they need for a "Cape Canaveral 2."
  - washedup 13y ago
    The launch trajectories they follow when launching from Cape Canaveral don't allow them to buy land for the First Stage further down from the launch site. Many launches occur at Cape Canaveral because they allow for a safe trajectory over open water, where people are less likely to be hurt in case of unexpected performance.
  - msandford 13y ago
    I would buy it for a couple of tests and once the systems have been proven to work go ahead and scrap the rig. The idea here is that initially there are many things that could go wrong and you want to make it safe for those things to go wrong, even very badly. Once the bugs have been worked out (if there are any) then you start bringing it back over land. The tricky part isn't going from 2m/s down to fully stopped and stationary on a launch pad, although I'm sure that's not easy. It's making sure you're completely in control through a whole bunch of maneuvers to transition from heading up very fast to heading back down at a moderate pace to a slowly descending hover. During some of those parts of flight you'll be moving very quickly to where a small sensor lag or instability could make differences measured in miles rather than inches. By putting the whole thing out to sea you eliminate huge swathes of risk be it human life, financial, PR, whatever. Even if you only did one rig landing and it worked you would gain huge confidence in the systems and you could potentially refuel it on the rig to some amount and fly it back to "base"
- pbreit 13y ago
  Isn't the intention to launch from the west coast where the booster would come down on land?
  - stackcollision 13y ago
    I have not heard about a west coast launch pad, but I was wondering how they planned to actually accomplish the landing. We (almost) always launch west-to-east, to take advantage of the roughly 400m/s you gain from the Earth's rotation. It wouldn't make sense to launch from the east coast and then have the boost fly back to get to land.
    - washedup 13y ago
      There are many launches from Vandenberg AFB, but most of these launches will travel south over the Pacific. It is generally used for placing payloads in Polar orbits. They never launch over land for fear or casualties if something goes wrong.
      - lutusp 13y ago
        > They never launch over land for fear or casualties if something goes wrong. Yes, that's true now, but at the height of the Shuttle program, Vandenberg AFB had begun to build, and planned to use, a Shuttle launch facility. So that's a policy change, because there was a time when they were more than willing to launch something very heavy over land to their east.
        sputknick 13y ago
        That launch facility was for polar orbiting shuttle missions, which were never executed.
        timdiggerm 13y ago
        Source for saying it would be exclusively used for polar missions?
cdash 13y ago
They won't be, they are doing another ocean landing in like 4 weeks. But hopefully sometime this year.
- extropy 13y ago
  Next launch will be to geostationary orbit. More fuel is needed to get there, I'm not sure if they have enough left for a boost-back.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Where did you get this information? As far as I can tell, the next launch is is for Orbcomm and should be to LEO. The last two GTO launches did not have reusability test burns because SpaceX was contractually obliged to use all of their delta-v getting the satellites into a highly elliptical orbit (which would allow the satellites to use less of their fuel for the inclination change, thus extending their lifespan). As far as I know, SpaceX only agreed to these sort of terms for those two GTO launches and future GTO launches will still include reusability burn tests.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

RALaBarge 13y ago

The fact that SpaceX has come so far in such a short time is amazing. I am quite confident that they will overcome any technical challenges RE: re-usable first stages

holecene 13y ago
SpaceX is rapidly turning into AM&M from 'The Rocket Company'[0]. [0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1563476967 http://www.amazon.com/The-Rocket-Company-Library-Flight/dp/1...

outworlder 13y ago

That's to be expected. But they got some very valuable data out of it.

astrowilliam 13y ago

This is an absolutely incredible feat of engineering and science. GO SPACEX!

Arjuna 13y ago

The article reports that the first stage achieved a near zero velocity landing. Another critical marker that was achieved, which is closely related, is that the first stage's flight dynamics (i.e., pitch, roll and yaw) were correct. Previously, the first stage was destroyed because the flight dynamics were incorrect. Also, the first stage continued to report telemetry for 8 seconds after the water landing. Does anyone know if the first stage's landing legs were successfully deployed before the water landing? These are the 4 carbon fiber and aluminum legs (each 25ft / 7.6m long) that would be used to land the stage. I know that Falcon 9 launched with them, but I don't know if they were deployed. My suspicion is that they would have attempted to deploy them as well, for verification and validation purposes.

Patrick_Devine 13y ago
SpaceX hasn't confirmed it, however I would assume that that would be the case. Elon has stated in the past that the legs would provide pitch stability which was missing in the last attempt to relight the first stage. Without it the first stage likely would tumble and a relight would be impossible due to the propellant being centrifuged. Here's a link which talks about it (about halfway through the article): http://www.space.com/23009-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-test-first-person.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AutoSpaceNews+%28Automated+Space+News%29 http://www.space.com/23009-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-tes...

nealabq 13y ago

For launches over land, how about landing in a lake instead of the ocean? It'd be easier to find, and salt water is corrosive.

jessriedel 13y ago
If you're confident enough that you can safely bring the rocket back over land to a target location like a lake, you might as well land it on the ground. The reason these stages land in the ocean is because it's a big safe place to drop a piece of metal you don't have control of.
mikeash 13y ago
I doubt they care about corrosion. None of the water-landed first stages will actually be reused.

cmapes 13y ago

Quick correction to the article: Gwynne Shotwell is not the President & CEO, she is the President & COO. It's very well known that Elon Musk is the CEO.