9 ms·

SpaceX Has Pinpointed the Problem That Caused the Falcon9 to Crash Land

189 points by 51Cards 12y ago

Florin_Andrei 12y ago
Great news (and a well-written article with plenty of relevant photos).
tsotha 12y ago
>Although the rocket's landing did not go according to plan, the other half of the launch mission was a success. Describing the first stage landing as "half" the mission is disingenuous. The mission was the ISS resupply, and even if the first stage landed properly if the resupply failed it would have meant a 100% mission failure.
- teraflop 12y ago
  So you're complaining that they're being disingenuous by describing their mission as a partial success instead of a complete success? Really?
  - oh_sigh 12y ago
    Why not? The key was to deliver supplies to the ISS.
  - cldellow 12y ago
    I disliked that element of the reporting too. Your use of "they" is funny, too--SpaceX and NASA would say that CRS-5 was a complete success from the point of view of the mission. The reporter's not being disingenuous, she's just...not using words correctly. The mission was to keep the ISS astronauts supplied and alive. The mission succeeded. The tests around rocket reuse were not part of the mission.
    - SapphireSun 12y ago
      True, but one is transformative and the other is more mundane. The issue is that to make progress in rocketry (the mission) you have to get other people to pay for it (making it ostensibly their mission). Not to knock the ISS in any way, it's just that any of the big players could have done this resupply run afaik.
      - jpgvm 12y ago
        SpaceX also does them cheaper and with a higher max cargo due to Dragon being a more advanced vehicle than most, it can also return significant cargo from the ISS. So no, the other big players currently aren't on the same level as SpaceX when it comes to ISS missions.
        tsotha 12y ago
        The Dragon capsule is a bit less capable than one would like in that it can't actually dock. That's what makes the Soyuz necessary and NASA's whatever-they're-calling-it-this-week capsule necessary. Technically the Dragon is "berthing", in that the space station's arm is what's actually bringing the two craft together, and any failure in that arm would render Dragon unable to connect or disconnect from the station.
      - Rooster61 12y ago
        "There's nothing routine about flying to the Moon." - Apollo 13 Film This isn't a moon mission of course, but I don't know if I would ever call something reaching orbit mundane. Especially for a company with only 5 successful dockings to their name.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    No, I'm complaining because they're pretending the first stage landing is "half" of the mission. It's not. The fact that it didn't work is almost meaningless, whereas a failure of the resupply mission would be a disaster.
  - grecy 12y ago
    I agree with you, and I find it fascinating that in May 2012 everyone celebrated SpaceX successfully docking with the ISS for the first time. [1] It's only been 2.5 years, and they'd only docked to the ISS a total of 5 times before this mission, and yet everyone now takes the mission and successful docking for granted and is looking for the next great thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_spaceflights_to_the_International_Space_Station#Current_and_completed_spaceflights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_spaceflights_t...
  - jccooper 12y ago
    The mission was delivering the cargo. That was a success. The landing was a free experiment operated as an adjunct to the launch. The experiment didn't quite go as hoped, but went pretty darn well.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    The first stage recovery was essentially bonus points. They were trying for 120% of the contracted, revenue-generating mission goals and only got 101%.
- khuey 12y ago
  This is where the concept of secondary objectives comes in.
xophe 12y ago
>> The tank filled with hydraulic fluid that powered the fins enabling them to rotate and steer, ran out of fluid before landing. Nit, but this is the most difficult sentence I've had to parse all year.
- alex_duf 12y ago
  Looks like a French sentence: The ideas are in an order I'm used to.
  - cmelbye 12y ago
    I think it's just missing a comma after "tank".
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      Yeah, or a "that".
- Lost_BiomedE 12y ago
  Bad news for me. I usually write like this: The tank filled with hydraulic fluid, powering the fins and enabling them to rotate and steer, ran out of fluid before landing. Hopefully the above reads more clearly. It is how I parsed it on first read.
  - philsnow 12y ago
    Even clearer: The tank--filled with hydraulic fluid, powering the fins, and enabling them to rotate and steer--ran out of fluid before landing. A (B C D) E
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Not everything needs to be a single sentence. "The tank of hydraulic fluid ran out before landing. This tank powered the fins that steer the rocket. Therefore the rocket could no longer be steered." Or there's the ablative: "The tank of hydraulic fluid having been emptied, the fins could no longer steer the rocket."
phkahler 12y ago
I still don't understand. Those waffle irons are not needed at low speed. They did grasshopper landing without them right? Or perhaps they interfere if they are present and not working correctly? Either way, why did the rocket hit "hard" as Elon said? Rocket velocity shouldn't have anything to do with the waffles right? I've been thinking someone forgot to include the height of the GPS in some code somewhere, and this whole hydraulic issue while true, is a handy way to not publicly disclose a simple mistake. Don't wanna look like the mars probe that crashed due to unit conversion issues... So really, how does the hydralic issue affect the impact velocity?
- Aeolun 12y ago
  If you can't orient your rocket correctly you're going to have a hell of a time getting it to slow down to the correct speed while also maintaining the correct position for touchdown. I'm not sure how the waffles help with that, but I'll believe the article if they say it's used for steering/rotating.
  - darkmighty 12y ago
    Right, I believe the grid fins are the primary roll control method (the other being friction and secondarily tilting the ship and making a precession around center of mass). If this force was lost while the control loop was expecting it to work things can go bad I guess.
    - rst 12y ago
      Also attitude control. The stage isn't going to be much of a glider no matter what you do with it, but at terminal velocity, it has nontrivial lift and drag, and changing those will change the trajectory.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Oddly, if it was a 'stupid' mistake I'm pretty sure they would own up to it. But lets look at what the these things do. During descent they provide control authority over roll, pitch, and yaw of the lower stage. Even though the center of gravity is near the bottom the rocket, the system is trying to keep it vertical. It is travelling down range and needs to go from moving sideways, to coming straight down. Earlier versions of Grasshopper used hypergolic thrusters on the sides but they were scrapped in favor of the fins system. So once you run out of hydraulic fluid, you're limited to the ability to gimbal the Merlin engines for controlling pitch and yaw. If you watch the video you can see that the fins are used all the way to the point where it lands. So my guess is they knew they were going to run out of hydraulic fuel and brought the rocket in "hot" (at a higher than planned approach speed) and didn't manage to get close enough before the fins stopped working. If that really was the only thing that didn't work correctly, then we'll know on the 29th.
duffyt 12y ago
Hydraulic systems are usually closed, can anyone explain why hydraulic fluid is expendable in this case?
- fogleman 12y ago
  An open hydraulic system is more lightweight.
  - modeless 12y ago
    Where do the weight savings come from? Hydraulic fluid is heavy; it seems like you could save quite a bit of weight by carrying less of it if it wasn't expendable. Not that I don't believe it, just curious.
    - pshc 12y ago
      I'm guessing you'd need more pistons, pumps, piping, etc. in a closed system. Probably need to repressurize the fluid.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Pumps and pipes. With an open system, you don't need to recompress the fluid and move it back, and from what I read, that hardware weights a lot.
      - bdonlan 12y ago
        Not to mention the power supply - what's going to run the pumps when the engines are shut off?
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Correct! Instead of using compressor(s) and recirculation plumbing, you're using an accumulator [1]. Weight and complexity savings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator
    - 12y ago
jccooper 12y ago
Not really new news; all this stuff has been known for days. But not a bad summary if you haven't been watching closely.
Animats 12y ago
If running out of stored hydraulic pressure is the only problem they had, that's good. That's easy to fix, although it means some weight penalty. What SpaceX did was a low-cost test. They were paid for a shipment to the ISS, which was successful. The test of the booster recovery system didn't cost them a launch. They didn't expend a booster just for this.
- Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  > That's easy to fix, although it means some weight penalty. It's probable that they use RP-1 as the hydraulic fuel and then dump it after use into the main RP-1 tank. In this case, assuming they don't need more high-pressure fluid than they need braking fuel, there is no weight penalty.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Indeed. They attempted to recycle a garbage rocket after it had been used already. This crash into the ocean thing. That happens on literally every single other rocket launch in history, it's not abnormal, it's just not usually filmed or even thought about much.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    Agreed, > That led many media outlets to call the gutsy landing attempt in the Atlantic a failure. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the launch was about: modern journalism seems to be the failure in this case.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Its a failed landing but not a failed mission. Unfortunately making such distinctions seems to be an editors dilemna with most mainstream media ..
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    which makes me curious, how many boosters are crashed into the ocean and what are the rules regarding them? From toxins to salvage. I know we have dumped far worse into the ocean, its littered with munitions for instance.
tommoose 12y ago
The news on a radio station in my area commented on this, saying something like: "...just like you recycle your milk bottles, cardboard etc. a company has tried to /recycle/ a rocket and it blew up...haha" It made me sad since I knew it was SpaceEx, understood the complexity of what they're attempting and they reduced it to comparing it to throwing an empty beer bottle in a bucket. I am relieved to see that SpaceEx is viewing it largely as a success/excellent learning experience; in my opinion they are by far the most exciting thing in science/technology at the moment.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  One of the annoying aspects of coverage of SpaceX's attempts, although fortunately it's fairly rare, is the desire to make fun of "eggheads" when they "fail" because it makes people feel superior. Nevertheless, this work is one of the most important things going on in human civilization right now. That may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but go back and look at things like the invention of the transistor or the internet. Nobody perceived fully how impactful either of those things would be though they've transformed the lives of billions and spawned trillions of dollars in economic activity. If reusing rockets becomes feasible, and there's every reason to believe it will be, then it will lower the costs of spaceflight by one to two orders of magnitude right off the bat. And that will vastly accelerate our investment, colonization, and exploration of space and kickstart a positive feedback loop of growth in activities in space (from infrastructure like GPS and commsats to human presence) spurring investment in improving space and launch systems which then increases activity levels (due to increasing capabilities and lower costs) which then spurs improvements, and so on. Ultimately culminating in mankind becoming not just a multi-planet species but a space faring civilization no longer confined to either the Earth or even this Solar System. And all of that will have grown from the tiny kernel of spaceflight activities in the present, with SpaceX's activities being particularly relevant for that future.
gdi2290 12y ago
crashed photos were released on twitter here https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555981841476227072 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555981841476227072
- iamcreasy 12y ago
  It's amazing that there were able to catch the needle in the storm.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Here's two more with the rocket actually visible and nearly upright - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978908554625025 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978908554625025, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555980855537975296 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555980855537975296 It's from the exchange between Carmack and Musk - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/555946079175208963 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/555946079175208963
- ohaal 12y ago
  Gif: http://img.gfx.no/1477/1477615/spacex2.gif http://img.gfx.no/1477/1477615/spacex2.gif (source, norwegian article: http://www.tek.no/artikler/se-spacex-raketten-kraesjlande-pa-dronelekteren/166947 http://www.tek.no/artikler/se-spacex-raketten-kraesjlande-pa...)
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    Which they lifted out of a reddit thread; http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2sm3q7/anglecorrected_gif_for_barge_crashlanding/ http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2sm3q7/anglecorrecte...
- gdi2290 12y ago
  vine video of the crash https://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK https://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK
AYBABTME 12y ago
When they recover their first 1st-stage, I'm curious what they will do with it. Use it on a self-funded test launch, or use it on a customer's launch, or just leave it there and look at it?
- coob 12y ago
  Take it apart and examine it I would imagine.
- lmm 12y ago
  Probably each of those in some order. The first few recoveries will just be for taking apart and analysing, but at some point they'll be launching them; I believe they're already asking around for a customer willing to launch something (at a heavy discount) on a second-hand rocket, but I wouldn't be surprised if the very first reuse launch was self-funded.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Building up a fuel depot in orbit would be a good use of used rockets at first. That way if something goes wrong all you lose is fuel.
- phkahler 12y ago
  They will likely get a call from the Smithsonian at some point. Tear it down, maybe test some parts, put it back together, and ship it to D.C. You'll be able to look at it and watch video of the launch and landing right there.
- simonh 12y ago
  I'm going to disagree with most of the other replies to this. I don't think they will keep/dismantle the first recovered stage. I'm sure they'll examine it minutely, but the whole point of this is to re-use rockets. My guess is that as long as the stage appears to be in working order they will want to actually do that as soon as possible. It's how Musk rolls.
jccooper 12y ago
Elon Musk has published a few photos of the almost-landing on Twitter. See: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978267165859840 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978267165859840 and following.
- 51Cards 12y ago
  "full RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly)" Love the term. Edit: apparently comes from KSP.
javiramos 12y ago
SpaceX <3
dtparr 12y ago
They just posted a video on vine: http://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK http://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK
nhayden 12y ago
>Most of the rocket was left behind, but some of the debris was recovered and returned along with the ship I don't get how this is ok. Why is it acceptable to leave thousands of pounds of scrap and chemicals in the ocean?
- mzs 12y ago
  You mean like in most every other launch? If this works that will end, I'll cut them a little slack.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > Why is it acceptable to leave thousands of pounds of scrap and chemicals in the ocean? Because in the quantities caused by spaceflight, its negligible. You should be far more concerned with the bottom trawling for seafood and plastics buildup from everyday consumers.
- lutorm 12y ago
  Most of the rocket is made of metal, which sinks.

189 points by 51Cards 12y ago

Great news (and a well-written article with plenty of relevant photos).

>Although the rocket's landing did not go according to plan, the other half of the launch mission was a success. Describing the first stage landing as "half" the mission is disingenuous. The mission was the ISS resupply, and even if the first stage landed properly if the resupply failed it would have meant a 100% mission failure.

teraflop 12y ago
So you're complaining that they're being disingenuous by describing their mission as a partial success instead of a complete success? Really?
- oh_sigh 12y ago
  Why not? The key was to deliver supplies to the ISS.
- cldellow 12y ago
  I disliked that element of the reporting too. Your use of "they" is funny, too--SpaceX and NASA would say that CRS-5 was a complete success from the point of view of the mission. The reporter's not being disingenuous, she's just...not using words correctly. The mission was to keep the ISS astronauts supplied and alive. The mission succeeded. The tests around rocket reuse were not part of the mission.
  - SapphireSun 12y ago
    True, but one is transformative and the other is more mundane. The issue is that to make progress in rocketry (the mission) you have to get other people to pay for it (making it ostensibly their mission). Not to knock the ISS in any way, it's just that any of the big players could have done this resupply run afaik.
    - jpgvm 12y ago
      SpaceX also does them cheaper and with a higher max cargo due to Dragon being a more advanced vehicle than most, it can also return significant cargo from the ISS. So no, the other big players currently aren't on the same level as SpaceX when it comes to ISS missions.
      - tsotha 12y ago
        The Dragon capsule is a bit less capable than one would like in that it can't actually dock. That's what makes the Soyuz necessary and NASA's whatever-they're-calling-it-this-week capsule necessary. Technically the Dragon is "berthing", in that the space station's arm is what's actually bringing the two craft together, and any failure in that arm would render Dragon unable to connect or disconnect from the station.
    - Rooster61 12y ago
      "There's nothing routine about flying to the Moon." - Apollo 13 Film This isn't a moon mission of course, but I don't know if I would ever call something reaching orbit mundane. Especially for a company with only 5 successful dockings to their name.
- tsotha 12y ago
  No, I'm complaining because they're pretending the first stage landing is "half" of the mission. It's not. The fact that it didn't work is almost meaningless, whereas a failure of the resupply mission would be a disaster.
- grecy 12y ago
  I agree with you, and I find it fascinating that in May 2012 everyone celebrated SpaceX successfully docking with the ISS for the first time. [1] It's only been 2.5 years, and they'd only docked to the ISS a total of 5 times before this mission, and yet everyone now takes the mission and successful docking for granted and is looking for the next great thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_spaceflights_to_the_International_Space_Station#Current_and_completed_spaceflights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_spaceflights_t...
- jccooper 12y ago
  The mission was delivering the cargo. That was a success. The landing was a free experiment operated as an adjunct to the launch. The experiment didn't quite go as hoped, but went pretty darn well.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  The first stage recovery was essentially bonus points. They were trying for 120% of the contracted, revenue-generating mission goals and only got 101%.
khuey 12y ago
This is where the concept of secondary objectives comes in.

xophe 12y ago

>> The tank filled with hydraulic fluid that powered the fins enabling them to rotate and steer, ran out of fluid before landing. Nit, but this is the most difficult sentence I've had to parse all year.

alex_duf 12y ago
Looks like a French sentence: The ideas are in an order I'm used to.
- cmelbye 12y ago
  I think it's just missing a comma after "tank".
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Yeah, or a "that".
Lost_BiomedE 12y ago
Bad news for me. I usually write like this: The tank filled with hydraulic fluid, powering the fins and enabling them to rotate and steer, ran out of fluid before landing. Hopefully the above reads more clearly. It is how I parsed it on first read.
- philsnow 12y ago
  Even clearer: The tank--filled with hydraulic fluid, powering the fins, and enabling them to rotate and steer--ran out of fluid before landing. A (B C D) E
- pjc50 12y ago
  Not everything needs to be a single sentence. "The tank of hydraulic fluid ran out before landing. This tank powered the fins that steer the rocket. Therefore the rocket could no longer be steered." Or there's the ablative: "The tank of hydraulic fluid having been emptied, the fins could no longer steer the rocket."

phkahler 12y ago

I still don't understand. Those waffle irons are not needed at low speed. They did grasshopper landing without them right? Or perhaps they interfere if they are present and not working correctly? Either way, why did the rocket hit "hard" as Elon said? Rocket velocity shouldn't have anything to do with the waffles right? I've been thinking someone forgot to include the height of the GPS in some code somewhere, and this whole hydraulic issue while true, is a handy way to not publicly disclose a simple mistake. Don't wanna look like the mars probe that crashed due to unit conversion issues... So really, how does the hydralic issue affect the impact velocity?

Aeolun 12y ago
If you can't orient your rocket correctly you're going to have a hell of a time getting it to slow down to the correct speed while also maintaining the correct position for touchdown. I'm not sure how the waffles help with that, but I'll believe the article if they say it's used for steering/rotating.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Right, I believe the grid fins are the primary roll control method (the other being friction and secondarily tilting the ship and making a precession around center of mass). If this force was lost while the control loop was expecting it to work things can go bad I guess.
  - rst 12y ago
    Also attitude control. The stage isn't going to be much of a glider no matter what you do with it, but at terminal velocity, it has nontrivial lift and drag, and changing those will change the trajectory.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Oddly, if it was a 'stupid' mistake I'm pretty sure they would own up to it. But lets look at what the these things do. During descent they provide control authority over roll, pitch, and yaw of the lower stage. Even though the center of gravity is near the bottom the rocket, the system is trying to keep it vertical. It is travelling down range and needs to go from moving sideways, to coming straight down. Earlier versions of Grasshopper used hypergolic thrusters on the sides but they were scrapped in favor of the fins system. So once you run out of hydraulic fluid, you're limited to the ability to gimbal the Merlin engines for controlling pitch and yaw. If you watch the video you can see that the fins are used all the way to the point where it lands. So my guess is they knew they were going to run out of hydraulic fuel and brought the rocket in "hot" (at a higher than planned approach speed) and didn't manage to get close enough before the fins stopped working. If that really was the only thing that didn't work correctly, then we'll know on the 29th.

duffyt 12y ago

Hydraulic systems are usually closed, can anyone explain why hydraulic fluid is expendable in this case?

fogleman 12y ago
An open hydraulic system is more lightweight.
- modeless 12y ago
  Where do the weight savings come from? Hydraulic fluid is heavy; it seems like you could save quite a bit of weight by carrying less of it if it wasn't expendable. Not that I don't believe it, just curious.
  - pshc 12y ago
    I'm guessing you'd need more pistons, pumps, piping, etc. in a closed system. Probably need to repressurize the fluid.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Pumps and pipes. With an open system, you don't need to recompress the fluid and move it back, and from what I read, that hardware weights a lot.
    - bdonlan 12y ago
      Not to mention the power supply - what's going to run the pumps when the engines are shut off?
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Correct! Instead of using compressor(s) and recirculation plumbing, you're using an accumulator [1]. Weight and complexity savings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator
  - 12y ago

jccooper 12y ago

Not really new news; all this stuff has been known for days. But not a bad summary if you haven't been watching closely.

Animats 12y ago

If running out of stored hydraulic pressure is the only problem they had, that's good. That's easy to fix, although it means some weight penalty. What SpaceX did was a low-cost test. They were paid for a shipment to the ISS, which was successful. The test of the booster recovery system didn't cost them a launch. They didn't expend a booster just for this.

Tuna-Fish 12y ago
> That's easy to fix, although it means some weight penalty. It's probable that they use RP-1 as the hydraulic fuel and then dump it after use into the main RP-1 tank. In this case, assuming they don't need more high-pressure fluid than they need braking fuel, there is no weight penalty.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Indeed. They attempted to recycle a garbage rocket after it had been used already. This crash into the ocean thing. That happens on literally every single other rocket launch in history, it's not abnormal, it's just not usually filmed or even thought about much.
- zamalek 12y ago
  Agreed, > That led many media outlets to call the gutsy landing attempt in the Atlantic a failure. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the launch was about: modern journalism seems to be the failure in this case.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Its a failed landing but not a failed mission. Unfortunately making such distinctions seems to be an editors dilemna with most mainstream media ..
- Shivetya 12y ago
  which makes me curious, how many boosters are crashed into the ocean and what are the rules regarding them? From toxins to salvage. I know we have dumped far worse into the ocean, its littered with munitions for instance.

tommoose 12y ago

The news on a radio station in my area commented on this, saying something like: "...just like you recycle your milk bottles, cardboard etc. a company has tried to /recycle/ a rocket and it blew up...haha" It made me sad since I knew it was SpaceEx, understood the complexity of what they're attempting and they reduced it to comparing it to throwing an empty beer bottle in a bucket. I am relieved to see that SpaceEx is viewing it largely as a success/excellent learning experience; in my opinion they are by far the most exciting thing in science/technology at the moment.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
One of the annoying aspects of coverage of SpaceX's attempts, although fortunately it's fairly rare, is the desire to make fun of "eggheads" when they "fail" because it makes people feel superior. Nevertheless, this work is one of the most important things going on in human civilization right now. That may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but go back and look at things like the invention of the transistor or the internet. Nobody perceived fully how impactful either of those things would be though they've transformed the lives of billions and spawned trillions of dollars in economic activity. If reusing rockets becomes feasible, and there's every reason to believe it will be, then it will lower the costs of spaceflight by one to two orders of magnitude right off the bat. And that will vastly accelerate our investment, colonization, and exploration of space and kickstart a positive feedback loop of growth in activities in space (from infrastructure like GPS and commsats to human presence) spurring investment in improving space and launch systems which then increases activity levels (due to increasing capabilities and lower costs) which then spurs improvements, and so on. Ultimately culminating in mankind becoming not just a multi-planet species but a space faring civilization no longer confined to either the Earth or even this Solar System. And all of that will have grown from the tiny kernel of spaceflight activities in the present, with SpaceX's activities being particularly relevant for that future.

gdi2290 12y ago

crashed photos were released on twitter here https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555981841476227072 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555981841476227072

iamcreasy 12y ago
It's amazing that there were able to catch the needle in the storm.
huhtenberg 12y ago
Here's two more with the rocket actually visible and nearly upright - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978908554625025 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978908554625025, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555980855537975296 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555980855537975296 It's from the exchange between Carmack and Musk - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/555946079175208963 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/555946079175208963
ohaal 12y ago
Gif: http://img.gfx.no/1477/1477615/spacex2.gif http://img.gfx.no/1477/1477615/spacex2.gif (source, norwegian article: http://www.tek.no/artikler/se-spacex-raketten-kraesjlande-pa-dronelekteren/166947 http://www.tek.no/artikler/se-spacex-raketten-kraesjlande-pa...)
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Which they lifted out of a reddit thread; http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2sm3q7/anglecorrected_gif_for_barge_crashlanding/ http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2sm3q7/anglecorrecte...
gdi2290 12y ago
vine video of the crash https://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK https://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK

AYBABTME 12y ago

When they recover their first 1st-stage, I'm curious what they will do with it. Use it on a self-funded test launch, or use it on a customer's launch, or just leave it there and look at it?

coob 12y ago
Take it apart and examine it I would imagine.
lmm 12y ago
Probably each of those in some order. The first few recoveries will just be for taking apart and analysing, but at some point they'll be launching them; I believe they're already asking around for a customer willing to launch something (at a heavy discount) on a second-hand rocket, but I wouldn't be surprised if the very first reuse launch was self-funded.
mrfusion 12y ago
Building up a fuel depot in orbit would be a good use of used rockets at first. That way if something goes wrong all you lose is fuel.
phkahler 12y ago
They will likely get a call from the Smithsonian at some point. Tear it down, maybe test some parts, put it back together, and ship it to D.C. You'll be able to look at it and watch video of the launch and landing right there.
simonh 12y ago
I'm going to disagree with most of the other replies to this. I don't think they will keep/dismantle the first recovered stage. I'm sure they'll examine it minutely, but the whole point of this is to re-use rockets. My guess is that as long as the stage appears to be in working order they will want to actually do that as soon as possible. It's how Musk rolls.

jccooper 12y ago

Elon Musk has published a few photos of the almost-landing on Twitter. See: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978267165859840 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555978267165859840 and following.

51Cards 12y ago
"full RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly)" Love the term. Edit: apparently comes from KSP.

javiramos 12y ago

SpaceX <3

dtparr 12y ago

They just posted a video on vine: http://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK http://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK

nhayden 12y ago

>Most of the rocket was left behind, but some of the debris was recovered and returned along with the ship I don't get how this is ok. Why is it acceptable to leave thousands of pounds of scrap and chemicals in the ocean?

mzs 12y ago
You mean like in most every other launch? If this works that will end, I'll cut them a little slack.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Why is it acceptable to leave thousands of pounds of scrap and chemicals in the ocean? Because in the quantities caused by spaceflight, its negligible. You should be far more concerned with the bottom trawling for seafood and plastics buildup from everyday consumers.
lutorm 12y ago
Most of the rocket is made of metal, which sinks.