SpaceX Lands on a Barge and Puts a Dragon in Orbit
SpaceX Lands On A Barge in the Ocean While A Dragon Flies To Orbit (images and video)
“SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 this afternoon. The rocket’s first stage returned from space and landed on an automated drone ship offshore a few minutes later. Meanwhile, the second stage successfully placed a Dragon spacecraft into orbit. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is delivering almost 7,000 pounds of cargo, including the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), to the orbital laboratory following its launch on a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:43 p.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.”
Looks like @SpaceX missed their landing site by 20 ft. Guess they'll have to launch it again & try it a second time pic.twitter.com/uzv1KacBb0
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 8, 2016
@NASAWatch @SpaceX @SpaceRef now I’m slightly worried about the @TeslaMotors automated driving.
— Chris Ridd (@chrisridd) April 8, 2016
Anyone watching the SpaceX video presentation would think it’s a well-rehearsed event like the nightly news on any of the networks. Crisp with reliable video and some pretty excited young people. And a very useful crawl at the bottom of the screen. (If they’ve done it before I haven’t seen it).
And then the stage came flying into the top of the screen! What a sight.
They did the timeline on the previous launch as well, I think it’s fantastic
The first launch employing the timeline was CRS-7. They’ve done one for every launch since.
I literally couldn’t believe it. She came in, she manoeuvred true, she touched down and she stayed upright! Finally, we can be sure that it can be done!
All together now:
“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,
When he said the world was round!
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound!
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother,
They laughed at us but now!
Ho-ho-ho! Who’s got the last laugh now?“
Hehehe.
Congrats to SpaceX on this.
Excellent work! Congratulations to the SpaceX team!
Job well done!
Very exciting!
And great running dialogue by their commentators.
Looks like one foot pad is just about dead center of the bulls-eye on “sure I still love you”, their drone landing ship. Next time they’ll have to move it over just a few feet.
Nailed!
Wow! Congrats to SpaceX and their visionary and tenacious leader!
BREAKING: Elon Musk has talked about this stage’s refurbishment process. A series of 10 test firings are planned (to be conducted at CCAFS) and he is hoping to re-fly the stage with a customer’s payload some time in June!
This brings mix feelings. Yes, it is important to show that these first stages may be flown again. But this is also a very historic rocket, more so then the one that landed at the Cape since as far as I am able to determine it is the first rocket to ever land on a vessel at sea. This means historically it is as important as Eugene Ely making the first landing on a ship, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, in 1911 marking the birth of naval aviation. This booster, more so that the earlier one, is the one than needs to go to the Smithsonian’s museum for display.
I’m not sure. The first landing on solid ground might have been the historic event. Since you bring up landing an airplane on a ship, remember that this has never been commercially viable. If the military applications hadn’t panned out, the whole idea would have been a dead end.
The same could turn out to be true of reusing first stage rockets: What if, with more experience, we learn that landing on solid ground is much, much more reliable than landing on a barge? For all we know, that could justify a new design and the extra overhead to get the rocket to a fixed landing site (are the Bahamas in range?) Or it might not, and landing on a barge is a better choice. I don’t think we can be sure at this point.
By the way, where did Ely’s Curtiss model D end up? A quick search didn’t turn up either a name or a tail number. The Wikipedia page on the model D listed several in museums, but not this one.
landing on the barge means the core stage can land further down ranged instead of having to fly all the way back to the launch site. which should mean improved payload to orbit capacity because less propellant.
Obviously. But is the extra payload worth it? What if, hypothetically, the best they can do is a 90% success rate landing on a barge, but can manage 95% on land? That would be ten extra flights from the same rocket, and that might be worth a significant hit to the payload per flight. I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying it could be true. We won’t know until we have far more experience in landing rockets.
Or just have the best of both worlds by moving to an inland launch site. Spaceport American was originally intended for TSTO flights. The procedures were based on the hundreds of off range flights that the military has done since the 1950’s at WSMR.
Folks in rural New Mexico are already used to seeing Pershings and Scuds flying overhead, a Falcon would fit right in 🙂
New technologies require new paradigms instead of trying to shoehorn it into old ones.
I suspect it was the one Ely was killed in when he crashed in October 1911. Pity as it would have had a place of honor in the Smithsonian or the Navy’s museum at Pensacola since it was a historical aircraft.
As for commercial applications, for fixed winged aircraft that is true, but commercial helicopters fly from commercial ships and platforms daily.
But remember this wasn’t a commercial flight since it was a NASA mission SpaceX was flying as a government contractor. But it was still a historical one just the same.
No. Wrong launch inclination.
There doesn’t seem to be any convenient land-to-land trajectories that fly over water in between (or at least over unpopulated areas), which are suitable to set up a launch site.
[The exception would be Russian launch sites in Kazakhstan (the overflight area isn’t unpopulated, but the Russians don’t seem to mind the threat to villagers.) A couple of downrange landing sites at useful inclinations would give Russia a chance to copy SpaceX.]
Jiuquan is also well inland. I think the Chinese may be more willing to overfly inhabited areas than the Russians. The Kazaks have started complaining about toxic fuel residue in the crashed lower stages, and occasionally threaten to send bills for cleanup costs.
But I’m still not sure about flyback to land on, well, land. What sort of range does the stage have after separation and how far down track does a Falcon 9 stage? Or, if necessary, what are the numbers for a redesigned but similar vehicle? The did get one all the way back to the launch site last December. If we’re talking hundreds of kilometers cross-track, I’d be surprised if no islands were in range. Now that I’ve bothered to look at a map, asking about the Bahamas was fairly dim. But Bermuda doesn’t look too far off a due-east ground track.
Way too far (over 1000km), and on a single extremely narrow launch inclination. (IIRC, the maximum down-range is around 600km. 4-500km is more typical for non-LEO launches.)
Even if you could make the range, say for very light payloads on low trajectory LEO insertions, you’re still limited to that single launch inclination. And that’s assuming you can find somewhere on Bermuda that will let you throw a rocket at them.
Excellent!
Meanwhile, NASA management is scratching their head trying to figure out how that can be achieved without all parties following their formal 7120.5 process.
Bingo.
I missed it! Oh well… still, AWESOME!
AWESOME, AWESOME, AWESOME.
This is history.
It’s great to have the spine tingle from time to time…
Congrats to SpaceX employees, past and present, and to those of us who KNEW that they could do this.
I was at a pub having a few pints, while watching this live. I couldn’t keep my emotions inside. I literally started crying tears of happiness when the 1st stage stuck the open ocean barge landing. People probably thought I was some kind of lunatic. 99% of the population have NO FRIGGIN CLUE how historic this event was…and what a singular achievement by SpaceX, and by extension, the USA.
They will, friend. They will. Some folks wonder why I usually don’t watch rocket launches live anymore. If all someone does is launch a satellite and crash the booster, what ev’s? How many times has it been done? If any company says that they’ve done something…the exact same something…100 times in more than a decade without a mishap and they think that’s something to brag about in a technology industry then they’re as clueless as they look. Great, they know how to use 50 year old tech flawlessly. Whoopie! Yes, I know it’s hard, and they deserve some credit, but by not even trying to advance the tech after 100 repetitions they have lost my interest.
Planetary Science launches, Lagrange launches, Moon launches (got some coming up next year), recovered boosters, any new things in space that have never (or not often or not for a while or only recently) been done, that is the advancement of our species and part of our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ futures.
That was amazing. But I think it does require calm seas with the relatively small barge. There is speculation about using the Sea Launch platform for landing instead; as a semisubmersible it would be much more stable.
It was fascinating to watch the booster after staging; when you would expect it to tumble and fall, instead as soon as it separated it was busy firing thrusters, turning around, lighting engines and heading back to Earth.
The swell was large enough to break over the bow of the barge. The wind was gusting in the 30-50mph range. Any worse conditions and the launch itself would have probably had to scrub.
A semi-submersible platform may be more stable, that doesn’t make the Sea Launch platform a good buy. It’s intended for launches, the infrastructure is not suited to landing. The launch pad is nothing like you’d want for a landing pad. So you’d essentially be gutting the entire platform and rebuilding it to suit SpaceX’s needs. In which case, why buy the platform from Sea Launch. Any platform would do.
I did not see any waves breaking _over_ the bow in the video. There are a few whitecaps visible but the swells don’t look like more than 3-4 feet to me. Do you have a weather report for the barge location t the time of the landing?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
On one of the previous launches the booster was intentionally brought down in the sea because the weather at the barge was considered too severe to attempt a landing.
The current SpaceX drone barge was converted for the purpose, and despite the current downturn in offshore drilling the Odessy has little prospect for employment as a launch platform and would likely be available at lower cost (and with an easier conversion path) than a complete new platform or a semisubmersible fitted out for drilling. What SpaceX does will presumably depend on what is available and at what cost.
I think you’re missing the size of the barge. 300ft long, 160ft wide. Against that, a 3-4 foot swell would look like a pane of glass.
(You may also be confusing “chop” with “swell”.)
30 knots with gusts up to 50, IIRC.
Why do you think Sea Launch would be an easier conversion?
There is no doubt in my mind that Space-x will make it to mars with their first group of astronauts in my lifetime and quite possibly before NASA even launches a human payload on SLS. I think Elon Musk will certainly go down in history as one of Earth’s greatest visionaries and the man who finally made humankind a spacefaring and multi planet society. Well done everyone at space-x.
I watched SpaceX technical webcast saw Falcon 9 first stage fly in 2 degrees angle landed off center 4 feet from the bullseye target on ASDS. I could not believe they nail it the landing and Falcon 9 first stage stay upright did not tip over to explode this time. Live video feed come from hexicopter drone notice almost 9 minutes with the Dragon capsule and solar wing deployed feed interrupt for few minutes. It was the greatest moment in space history ever congrats to SpaceX job well!
Congratulations to SpaceX on the landing. As far as I know this is the first time a rocket has landed on a vessel at sea successfully. It is truly a historic achievement.
Right now! Visit http://www.portcanaveralwebcam.com for live view of F9 work.