SpaceX Places A Dragon In Orbit – And Lands In The Water
This is the booster's POV – watch the right grid fin pic.twitter.com/xMFpF0aoT5
— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) December 5, 2018
Tracking shot of Falcon water landing pic.twitter.com/6Hv2aZhLjM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2018
Keith’s note: SpaceX successfully placed a Dragon cargo vehicle into orbit today. Alas, as it returned to Earth, the Falcon 9’s first stage lost control and it landed in the ocean.
…as designed in the event of abnormal recovery performance or system failure. WTG, SpaceX – a successful failure!
Actually lots of good news in this particular booster failure to land properly.
1. The primary mission was successful. Failure of the first stage landing systems typically do not impact the primary mission. Customers like this.
2. The booster is aimed at the ocean so that if anything goes wrong, it will fall in the ocean. Only if everything is progressing o.k. does the booster change course to the landing pad or autonomous drone ship.
So the booster hitting the water was a good thing since it couldn’t damage anything, or anyone, on the ground. Safety is a good thing.
3. The booster actually did a great job of landing itself on top of the ocean, so it was still intact. So, it looks like they’ll be able to recover the booster, which should help with the investigation as to why the “grid fin hydraulic pump stalled” (quote from Elon Musk Tweet). Recovery of failed hardware is a good thing.
Musk also said that if this booster passes inspection they could reuse it for an internal mission. That would piss off all the right people.
Exposure to salt water means a lot more cleaning and inspection is required. Essentially every seal may need to be replaced.
Kudos to the controls engineers. A successful failure.
Design engineers, yes. Flight engineers? Nope. Falcon 9’s fly themselves. Autonomously . Even the landing is handled entirely by the avionics. No human interaction except the guy who commands an FTS destruct if needed.
Of course. “Controls engineers”, as in the people that design and build the controls (the avionics and its software).
Too bad it didn’t stick the landing on land. But, if it is recovered, it shouldn’t be too hard to tell what happened and fix the problem. Just float it into Port Canaveral, pull it out of the ocean, and hose it down with fresh water. Check it out thoroughly and crank it up for the next flight!
Hose it down with fresh water? Hardly!
Really, really impressed they got it down in one piece with a major system failure. Shows the robustness of the design.
Did you see that center Merlin gimbaling like a bat out of Hell, trying to null out the roll? Day’um…
I didn’t know about the “aim for the water in case of anomaly” feature, but doesn’t it also have a destruct package if that doesn’t work and it’s headed for Cocoa Beach? I’d think range safety would still want that option.
Im not sure it would be a good idea to rain cocoa beach with rocket parts but eh each to there own !
Actually it’s aimed at the water initially. Only if everything is progressing as it should does it change course and head for the landing area (be it a concrete landing pad or an autonomous drone ship). We also saw this when the core of the first Falcon Heavy flight didn’t have enough “starter fluid” for the engines for the landing burn and the booster hit the water (at high speed) away from the autonomous drone ship.
In engineering, this is called a “fail safe” design.
FWIW, during the SSO-A launch, I noticed the booster used there (which was on its third flight) had difficulty deploying the same grid fin. This may be coincidental but I suspect that SpaceX needs to inspect all the grid fin on currently-in-service boosters to see if the joints or the hydraulic pipes clog up after a while.
I’m not sure what you mean by currently-in-service boosters. The CRS-16 launch was the first flight of that booster.
No the grid-fins on the SSO-A core deployed normally for the Titanium version. According to John Insprucker on the webcast they have to deployed the Titanium grid-fan more slowly because they got a lot more mass than the old aluminum ones.
Gotta remember to change those filters :_>
Look for a restriction on land recoveries until a few more barge landings are demonstrated
The first ground landing was successful and they did it when their track record for barge landings was zero out of two attempts. Unless you think the Air Force is out to get SpaceX, I don’t see why there would be any new restrictions. (And, yes, I believe it is the Air Force, since the landing pad is in the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.)
Nope. Not happening. You must have missed how well this “failure”, actually worked
In case of water landing, your commemorative SpaceX seat cushion can be used as a flotation device…
I wonder if that will be a BFR feature?
Looks like the interstage took a hit
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…