I’m looking for a visual plot of the path the Falcon 9 first stage takes during its entire boost phase and return to launch site phase, where the scale is the same both in vertical height and distance along the ground track.
I’ve found a lot of diagrams similar to this:
But I can’t tell if the vertical and horizontal scales are the same in any that I’ve found, I want a visualization of the actual shape of its trajectory. Something that also shows its velocity at various points would be nice too.
Yes, that’s very helpful. I zoomed in and scoured over that and couldn’t find anything where it explicitly gave the scaling, but there are plenty of indications in the text on there that it is intended to be 1:1, thank you.
Lacking any scaling legend or verbiage I just measured by eyeball the height of the 100km Von Karman line versus the various downrange distances. Which passes the TLAR check.
It was made by Some Guy On Reddit and I don’t know what SGOR’s credentials are so take it with a grain of salt. But based on the description of the intent - to show the trajectory as it would appear to an onlooker from the side - as well as the methodology shown - I think ot seems reliable enough.
I wasn’t really looking for sub-kilometer accuracy. Mostly, I was wondering how could the first stage make it all the way back given the limited leftover fuel, but now I see the RTLS launches are at a steeper initial angle and have a much shorter distance to send the rocket backwards than I’d gathered from the real time infographics SpaceX usually shows during their launch videos.
Since it seems like your question was answered I can share a big of methodology
In this case I got lucky, I just looked up “Falcon 9 Trajectory” and saw the picture come up in image search; I then went to the source, saw it was a thread where a Reddit nerd crunched the numbers (which is often a surprisingly good source for this kind of info) and that the comments were full of other Reddit nerds who checked the first guy’s work (the peer review process, even if informal!) so I figured this would be good enoigh for this thread.
My backup plan was to check out the Kerbal Space Program forums. SpaceX rockets are a very popular thing to try and recreate using mods like Real Solar System and the players who go that hard on their realism will often do impressive amounts of work to figure out exactly how the real rockets do things so they can recreate it as closely as possible. I know I’ve seen graphs like the one above on the KSP forums, so if a quick and dirty search didn’t work that would have been my next step.
