That’s the first time a Falcon Heavy center core has landed on a drone ship.
So the USA now has a reusable heavy launcher. And this is just the beginning. All the pieces are here for Starship to be what the shuttle should have been.
I’m looking forward to a trip to the moon someday 
That was awesome! I’m watching the webcast giggling like a fool! SpaceX has managed to bring back the joy of space, seeing all this incredibly difficult stuff happen at the same time.
I presume they would have mentioned if they were going to try to retrieve the fairings at the same time. I know they were relocating one ship from the West coast to the East.
Payload has separated, looks like everything today has been completely successful! Shiny!
That was fun to watch–one of those “Holy Hannah, this is the future” experiences.
On a technical aside: They said the oxygen “snow” we could see at about T+25 was from the “liquid oxygen overboard drain”; am I correct in presuming that’s an overpressure vent that comes into play as atmospheric pressure drops out?
I re-watched the whole thing, and early on they mentioned that they would not attempt to catch the fairings.
As an arm-chair engineer, I wish they had a second smaller barge with a fiber optic tether to the main one to handle the uplink of the landing video. But honestly, it’s just a publicity thing rather than vital to the mission.
And, as fast as the *Mr. Stephen *ship is, I wonder if a hovercraft might be a lot faster. But maybe they can’t go that far from shore?
I don’t think it’s strictly related to the external pressure–but they do have to vent gaseous oxygen for various reasons. When you hear “MVac chill” during launch, they’re talking about running liquid oxygen through the engine, which turns to gas as it chills the engine components (feed lines, pumps, etc.). The oxygen gas isn’t useful as propellant at that point so it’s just dumped overboard.
Starship/BFR uses autogenous pressurization, which means that the tanks are pressurized with their respective gaseous propellants (either oxygen or methane). Most likely, they’ll scavenge any extra gas by putting it back in the tanks.
For this flight, the GO twins are tasked with plucking the fairing half’s out of the drink.
What’s the over/under they needed to do another cleanup in the ULA boardroom?
They would have built a ship to deliver people to the ISS if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!
Seriously? They got twice as much as SpaceX and they still aren’t ready?
That was awesome.
Apparently, that launch cost $95 million. The nearest big rocket, Delta IV Heavy, lifts about half as much and costs $350 million per launch, making Falcon Heavy a little less than 1/7 the cost of its main competition. With block 5, costs could come down more and payload could go up a bit.
Next launch is in June. This time a military launch that will help certify Falcon Heavy as an EELV for military payloads.
In the meantime, the Starship hopper has actually lit its engines, and the full-scale Starship is already under construction. Exciting times!
I wish Bezos would hurry up. We need competition. I kept thinking, “If Falcon Heavy blows up on the pad, it’s going to set back all plans by at least a year or two.” If we want space travel to be robust, we need multiple companies flying reusable rockets.
Bezos & company just don’t do “hurry up”. It is interesting how fundamentally different the philosophies of these two “Famous Bad Boy Billionaires Trying to Get Humanity to the Stars” are. But, I certainly wish both those enterprises well–having SpaceX and Blue Origin with working, at least partially reusable, and (relatively) cheap systems for getting into space–that would be the ticket, all right. (“How much for a round trip ticket from Atlanta to Luna City? Economy Class, of course–I’m not some billionaire.”)
I prefer the SpaceX way - build fast, iterate fast. Bezos seems to be stuck in the old method of “think of everything you possibly can and try to build the rocket perfectly.” That’s the traditional way of building rockets, but it’s slow and a failure can send you back to the drawing board and eat up years of development. SpaceX could crash their test hopper and have another one flying in a couple of months - or learn from the first flights and iterate another version quickly.
It certainly does seem like the hare has been beating the pants off the tortoise so far.
Now this was unexpected.
They recovered both fairing halves from a splashdown, undamaged, and plan on reusing them. Guess they decided the net approach wasn’t quite working. Not sure if they improved the fairings to prevent salt water intrusion, etc.
Just think of all the operational expertise SpaceX is building up along the way. Everything from communications to docking to techniques for refurbishment and a million other things. It takes time to build up a company skillset and a lot of experienced people. SpaceX has been gaining that experience and skillset while Bezos perfects his rocket. Even if Blue Origin comes out with a great rocket, they still have to build up the operational competency and infrastructure to carry out complex missions.
Holy cow. If they can recover the fairings intact and reusable, that’s what, another $14 million off the launch cost, minus whatever it costs to transport and refurb them?
Also, those block 5 boosters are scheduled to be reflown in June. That puts an upper limit on refurbishment time to be about two months, minus the time it takes them to get to the refurb facility, minus the time needed for transportation and integration for the next flight. Plus some fudge factor.
It looks likely that those boosters only need minimal refurbishment between those flights.
Something like 90% of that rocket is now being reused. Once there is real competition, SpaceX will likely have a fair bit of room to lower prices even further.
The tweet says they’ll reuse them for a Starlink mission. I wonder if the idea is to test these things on missions that can accept a high level of risk. SpaceX is going to be building satellites by the thousands, so who cares if there’s the occasional deployment failure? Eventually they’ll get it right.
Yeah, that was really cool to watch. They’ve got to hurry and convert the TEL back to the Falcon 9 configuration for CRS-17, currently scheduled for April 26. May might feature a launch of StarLink satellites, June is currently scheduled for another Falcon Heavy launch (STP-2), and perhaps the Crew Dragon In Flight Abort Test, and then July will hopefully have Demo Mission 2 (manned spaceflight from American soil). Exciting few months for SpaceX.
Six spaceships, technically speaking. Each of the fairing halves made it to >100 km, making them spacecraft, and have independent avionics systems and maneuvering thrusters.
Sad news - The middle core that landed on the Of Course I Still Love You toppled off the barge in very rough seas of 8 to 10 foot swells. Yeah, that’s not a job I’d like to have, trying to keep a very, very thin 28 story building stable on top of a barge in rough seas.
Yeah, that must be frustrating for them. It’s what they designed the octagrabber (“Roomba”) for, but so far I don’t know that they’ve used it on an operational basis (and according to the article, it isn’t compatible with the center core yet anyway). Well, just one more thing for them to work out. At least they’ve got the side cores.