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  • select-fire
    Wonderful.
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  • Rocky Raab
    Even for those of us who worked with the Space Shuttle 30 years ago, what SpaceX does is nearly surreal. In fact, the best NASA engineers 30 years ago said that returning a booster to land was if not impossible at least nearly so. Maybe it was - then.

    And before any of you "Why waste money in space" types start to beach about it, let me remind you that space is as integral to your life as electricity. The very internet you're beaching on wouldn't work without satellites. Nor would the device you're typing it on.
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  • Warbirds
    It?s definitely good stuff!
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  • Maalox
    Enjoyed watching the launch. Quite a bit different from when Jules Bergman described the Apollo missions with the lunar modules on a stick.
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  • Ditch-Runner
    I am always amazed at how fast we are advancing in technology

    do you think in 40 years they will say " look at that old space x footage do you realize you communication devise has more computing power than it did" :D
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  • Rocky Raab
    Update to the Falcon Heavy core booster...

    Due to rough seas, the recovery crew was unable to ratchet down the booster on the barge, and when the seas got to 10 feet, they abandoned the effort for safety reasons. The booster toppled over and was lost at sea. This was the first time that rough seas prevented them from securing it.
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  • Don McManus
    Rocky Raab wrote:
    Update to the Falcon Heavy core booster...

    Due to rough seas, the recovery crew was unable to ratchet down the booster on the barge, and when the seas got to 10 feet, they abandoned the effort for safety reasons. The booster toppled over and was lost at sea. This was the first time that rough seas prevented them from securing it.

    That is too bad.

    When watching the landing, I was wondering how they would ensure that the booster remained vertical. The seas seemed fairly rough at the time of touchdown, and the feet are fairly narrow wrt to the height of the booster.

    They got the thing to land on a postage stamp from 100s of miles away, and the failure was due to the simplest of things.

    Any idea how long it remained vertical?
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  • Rocky Raab
    They reported it "over the weekend" but didn't say exactly when the loss occurred. But it had to be within hours of the touchdown.

    For regular Falcon 9 boosters, they use a device they call an "octoweb" which attaches to the engine mounting structure at the base and ratchets down to the deck. But the Falcon Heavy has a different design because it has to link to the side boosters, making the octoweb unusable. They're working on a design specifically for the Heavy rocket, but didn't have it for this launch.

    In other news, they did in fact recover both halves of the payload shroud and plan to reuse them later this year. That leaves only the second stage as unrecoverable - and that proved so technically difficult and costly to performance (extra weight) that they've given up on that. They deliberately de-orbit the second stage over the Pacific and burn it up. That actually represents most of the launch cost, besides labor hours. Fuel is the cheapest part of the launch.
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  • truthful
    Good for Musk! NASA with an unlimited budget, and unlimited time, would still have no clue how to do that.
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  • truthful
    SpaceX might even be able to put a man on the moon and get him back safely without having to fake it.
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  • Rocky Raab
    The only "fake" in the Apollo moon landings is the fake "intelligence" of those who don't believe it.
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  • Don McManus
    Rocky Raab wrote:
    They reported it "over the weekend" but didn't say exactly when the loss occurred. But it had to be within hours of the touchdown.

    For regular Falcon 9 boosters, they use a device they call an "octoweb" which attaches to the engine mounting structure at the base and ratchets down to the deck. But the Falcon Heavy has a different design because it has to link to the side boosters, making the octoweb unusable. They're working on a design specifically for the Heavy rocket, but didn't have it for this launch.

    In other news, they did in fact recover both halves of the payload shroud and plan to reuse them later this year. That leaves only the second stage as unrecoverable - and that proved so technically difficult and costly to performance (extra weight) that they've given up on that. They deliberately de-orbit the second stage over the Pacific and burn it up. That actually represents most of the launch cost, besides labor hours. Fuel is the cheapest part of the launch.

    Thanks, Rocky.

    The SRBs of the Shuttle were designed to float. I am not a Rocket Surgeon, but it seems that a floating backup plan based on the SRB would be fairly easy to implement.

    Overall, however, a true technical achievement that cannot be dismissed by one portion going wrong.
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  • Rocky Raab
    The difference is that a liquid-fuel rocket has many times more electronics and turbine gizmos in the bottom end, none of which do well once exposed to salt water. The Shuttle SRBs were refurbishable, but it was a long and expensive process, made possible only because they were so mechanically simple. Even then, the hydrazine-powered hydraulic units that steered the nozzle had to be replaced every time, and little more than the steel outer casings were reused.
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  • Don McManus
    Rocky Raab wrote:
    The difference is that a liquid-fuel rocket has many times more electronics and turbine gizmos in the bottom end, none of which do well once exposed to salt water. The Shuttle SRBs were refurbishable, but it was a long and expensive process, made possible only because they were so mechanically simple. Even then, the hydrazine-powered hydraulic units that steered the nozzle had to be replaced every time, and little more than the steel outer casings were reused.

    Thanks, Rocky. Makes sense.
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