Thanks! I was really surprised to have caught it since my camera isn’t fantastic. I did later look at what a really nice lens would cost… $12k is a tad beyond what I’m willing to spend :).
Now I wish I’d stuck with it longer–I’ll bet I could have caught some of the poofs from the first stage maneuvering thrusters putting it in position for the boostback burn.
Successful launch and first stage landing (on land, not on a ship) today, after a scrub yesterday. Nice to watch it live.
Brian
Too early for a weekend! But the non-live-steam was entertaining nevertheless.
I was hoping for slightly better ground footage of the landing since it was daytime, but the clouds didn’t cooperate. Not terrible, though.
Sounds like their operations at Launch Complex 39A went off without a hitch–this is their first launch from there. Cool to be a part of the history there–both Apollo and the Shuttle were launched from that pad.
If I’m counting correctly, SpaceX now has eight landed cores. I think they’re gonna need another warehouse. Maybe they can stack them in a giant circle… Spacehenge.
Oh, it looks like there’s some great drone footage that they uploaded to their channel:
Bump for an emerging mystery aboard Of Course I Still Love You.
I say “mystery” because SpaceX won’t confirm what the new doodad is, but the description and photo make sense to me as a remotely-operated capture-and-secure platform. I guess the old SOP for securing a landed stage was to have the nearby support boat dock with the landing platform, a crew to embark the platform, and that crew secures the landed stage. That sounds kind of time-consuming, and of perceptible risk to the personnel engaged in the operation. Setting up an ROV to do it hands-off from a safe distance sounds like a very SpaceX thing to me.
Yup–it’s impossible for that not to be a robot that secures the landed stage.
It appears to have two tracks for movement, some electric hydraulic pumps, and four arms that rotate up and grab the hardpoints of the octoweb.
I presume it’s manually controlled, like with an RC controller, but who knows. I’m curious if it stabilizes the rocket through sheer mass, some self-welding mechanism, magnets, or something else. I’d guess just mass; obviously it has a low center of gravity and they can ballast it as much as they want. It certainly looks pretty beefy.
They actually had a serious problem with a previous stage that landed a tad hard and overcompressed one of the leg shock absorbers. They have a crumple zone in the shocks that can take a lot of energy but doesn’t bounce back. The stage ended up being kinda tippy and walked over to the edge of the barge as it rolled in fairly high seas. Not safe for the employees, and almost lost the stage to boot. So this seems like a great solution if it works.
They need a name. I hope they pick something from the Culture series again. Size Isn’t Everything? Fine Till You Came Along? You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave?
Update for a major SpaceX launch today:
This will be the first Falcon 9 launch using a re-used first stage. Specifically, this stage was used about a year ago to launch a Dragon cargo ship to the ISS, and successfully landed on a drone ship. Supposedly, the refurbishing process wasn’t very extensive – all major structures and engines are original, with relatively minor part replacement (some of the major engine seals IIRC). SpaceX stated that it took 4 months to refurbish the stage, but they expect the process to go much faster in the future.
I’m unreasonably excited to see that the first stage is still slightly dirty.
This particular launch is carrying the SES-11 commercial communications satellite to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, after which the core will attempt its second landing on the drone ship. The launch window is between 6:27 PM and 8:57 PM, Eastern time, and SpaceX has a live stream (with adorably awkward nerd commentary, or without).
(Also, I think it’s time for a new thread title, since this one hasn’t been very relevant most of the time…)
Title edited to indicate ongoing discussion of SpaceX launches, at OP’s request
Definitely super-exciting. Supposedly, SES (the satellite operator launching here) plans for three more launches this year, and if all goes well two of those will be on reused cores.
Even if this particular instance of reuse isn’t quite economic, the next revision of the Falcon (“Block 5”) has some reusability-based improvements. Even without having relaunched anything, they’ve obviously been able to learn a great deal from the landed stages and make some design tweaks based on the results.
One hour to go!
T-9 minutes, and streams are live.
SpaceX’s Twitter has a link to a story on Teslarati.com indicating they’ll land the stage on Of Course I Still Love You, and that the new capture platform (“landing-assist robot”) will get a tryout during this. So even more coolness.
[Quote=Dr. Strangelove]
They need a name. I hope they pick something from the Culture series again. Size Isn’t Everything? Fine Till You Came Along? You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave?
[/quote]
The same Teslarati article indicates that SpaceX has changed media franchise to name the platform: “Optimus Prime”. Color me disappointed. I think the idea put forth in The Register article I linked earlier would have been better: the name of the Culture drone character in The Player of Games, Mawhrin-Skel.
SpaceX is like that guy who after being told something is impossible looks at you and says, “Here, hold my beer.”
And the first stage has successfully boosted it’s payload and landed. For the second time.
Very nice, congratulations to SpaceX. I wish the live feed from Of Course had been available, but nonetheless. It’s a great achievement, and harbinger of future successes I hope.
ETA: Also, I wish the video feed would have been available to show Optimus Prime doing the capture-and-hold thing. I’ll have to wait for the after-the-fact video, I guess.
Awesome. I love the sense of energy the employees have–moments like this make the hard work worth it. I guess we’re going to see a few more of these this year!
I agree with lazybratsche regarding the dirty stage. One compelling aspect of the Star Wars universe was that everything looked well-worn–just like you’d expect any useful but unremarkable item to be. So to see a rocket launch in this well-maintained but obviously used state is somehow exciting.
One other thing about this launch that SpaceX has been quiet about is fairing recovery.
The payload fairings are sophisticated carbon-fiber structures and not cheap–on the order of several million for a pair (you need two halves to cover the payload). SpaceX has been wanting to reuse these not just because of the raw expense, but because the manufacturing is involved and time-consuming; you need giant ovens, and time for the carbon fiber to cure, and lots of other stuff.
So there have been rumors that SpaceX was going to recover the fairings in some way. The leading theory is that they’d use steerable parachutes, which is actually a pretty well-developed technology these days. The fairing would use cold gas thrusters to orient itself, re-enter the atmosphere, deploy the chute, and then then either land on the ocean, or even be picked up mid-air via helicopter.
Supposedly, they succeeded. What exactly this means remains to be seen, but the details should be interesting. It’s possible they even landed on the droneship, though that would probably require some kind of landing gear to give a soft landing (the advantage would be that it’s never immersed in salt water).
The fairings are ejected partly through the second-stage burn, so the effective mass penalty is somewhere between the first and second stage: not quite a 100% penalty as full second-stage components cost, but more than the 10-20% that first-stage components cost.
Rumors confirmed. They indeed landed the fairing in the ocean using a system of thrusters and steerable parachute. He says eventually they’ll have a “bouncy castle” to land on; clearly they don’t want to deal with the salt water immersion, so this is just the first step in demonstrating a soft, precision landing (rather like the first booster landing efforts). I wonder how big of an airbag they’ll need, and if it’ll require another droneship.
Outstanding!
Yeah, the fairing recovery is actually pretty badass. No one has a perfect cost breakdown, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of $35M for the first stage, $10M for the second, and $5M for the fairing. Fairing recovery has a huge bang/buck, especially now that first-stage reuse is working. They capture 1/3 of the remaining costs with almost no overhead.
They’ve said they’re still interested in second-stage recovery, but that’s a huge effort, and will have a far greater payload hit than first-stage or fairing recovery. It may never make sense for a kerosene-LOX rocket (though this raises a possibility: maybe they’ll build a Raptor based methane-LOX reusable upper stage for Falcon).
