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  #1  
Old 01-10-2015, 04:53 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Default Falcon 9's barge landing...

Hello All,

Minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral about an hour ago, the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle landed on the barge positioned downrange for it (see: http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/0...-status-center/ ). Meanwhile, the second stage injected the Dragon spacecraft into a good orbit, and the spacecraft has deployed its solar panels and begun its trip to the International Space Station, carrying cargo and supplies. SpaceX founder Elon Musk had given this initial first stage soft-landing recovery attempt only a one-in-ten chance of succeeding. The first stage re-entered properly and steered itself to the barge, but landed hard, exploding on the deck. The following Tweets from Elon Musk describe what happened:

1006 GMT (5:06 a.m. EST)
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has tweeted an update: "Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho."

1011 GMT (5:11 a.m. EST)
From Elon Musk's Twitter account: "Ship itself is fine. Some of the support equipment on the deck will need to be replaced..."

1017 GMT (5:17 a.m. EST)
From Elon Musk's Twitter account: Didn't get good landing/impact video. Pitch dark and foggy. Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces."
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Old 01-10-2015, 07:22 AM
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HILARIOUS that it is to be "Pieced together through Telemetry and ACTUAL PIECES" !

In "Model Rocketry" parlance that would be known as "Trash Bag-'N-Broom" recovery.
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Old 01-10-2015, 08:03 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ghrocketman
HILARIOUS that it is to be "Pieced together through Telemetry and ACTUAL PIECES" !

In "Model Rocketry" parlance that would be known as "Trash Bag-'N-Broom" recovery.
Wernher von Braun and his team had to do that--without the telemetry--at Peenemunde, until later in the A4's (V-2's) development, and Robert Goddard may never have had real-time telemetry. Also:

I'm not surprised that the visual record was poor, due to the fog. Having driven--*very* slowly and carefully!--at night in winter ice fog (which I encountered in low spots) that was so brilliantly lit up by my truck's headlights that nothing was visible except an all-encompassing white glare, I'm sure that the light from the Merlin-1D rocket engine (and the post-hard-landing explosion) similarly illuminated the fog around and over the landing barge, and far more brightly.
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Old 01-10-2015, 08:42 AM
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So what they don't have bright lights on the recovery ship? I guess they had to cut back somewhere.

"OK men, here are some flash lights. Get to work!"
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Old 01-10-2015, 09:16 AM
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Old 01-10-2015, 09:37 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randy



baby steps
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Old 01-10-2015, 01:27 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bernomatic
baby steps

Hitting the deck was amazing. Much more than a baby step.
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Old 01-10-2015, 11:18 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dlazarus6660
So what they don't have bright lights on the recovery ship? I guess they had to cut back somewhere.

"OK men, here are some flash lights. Get to work!"
With the first stage's center Merlin-1D engine firing, *no* additional light is needed. :-) From three miles away at night, a newspaper could be read by the "kerolox light" of a Saturn I launch (the early Saturn I first stages also produced 1.3 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, like the Falcon 9). Even from Miami, the bright yellow LOX/kerosene flame of the Saturn V (on Apollo 17, the only Apollo night launch) and the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters cast a glare and stark shadows on the branches of my north-side neighbor's tree, which stood where the rockets rose above our local horizon. The fog over the barge was no doubt lit up so brightly by the engine (and the explosion, after the stage landed hard and ruptured its tanks) that no details were visible on the video. I've seen the same phenomenon in ice fog, where my truck's headlights lit up the fog brilliantly, so that nothing *but* the light could be seen. Also:

For maximum accuracy during terminal descent, when setting up the final approach (still a few thousand feet up), the first stage could possibly (which I do not know) use lasers as well as GPS and/or inertial guidance (or the barge could beam a laser at sensors on the stage). Even if they use infrared lasers (which can pass through fog well), the infrared from any barge lights could make the barge deck a bigger, "fuzzier" target to the stage than it would appear otherwise (but again, I emphasize that I don't know if they use any laser guidance at all). And:
Quote:
Originally Posted by kapton
Hitting the deck was amazing. Much more than a baby step.
Heartily agreed! When NASA launched Surveyor 1 on Memorial Day, 1966, they also gave odds of no better than one-in-ten that the mission--the first operational use of the Atlas-Centaur *and* the first flight of the complex spacecraft, the very first to attempt a true soft-landing (Luna 9's landing that February, while successful, wasn't "soft" by human standards)--would succeed. NASA stated that Surveyor 1's mission objectives would be satisfied if the spacecraft's AMR (Altitude Marking Radar) merely detected the Moon and initiated the lander's terminal descent sequence--anything beyond that would be a welcome bonus. As it turned out, the only anomaly was the failure of one of Surveyor 1's two boom-mounted low-gain antennas to deploy after the spacecraft separated from the Centaur stage, but the slight impact of the landing days later caused the stuck boom to deploy. Now:

Consider how many things had to go right in order for the Falcon 9 first stage to even reach the landing barge. The ascent burn had to be full-duration, with no under-performance or early engine shutdowns (although on a certain segment of the ascent trajectory, an engine-out or under-performance situation could be compensated for). The ascent trajectory also had to--within limits--be neither too steep nor too shallow (this and the aforementioned engine situation could also have ruined the whole mission, not just the first stage's landing attempt). Also:

The first stage's four front-mounted grid fins all had to deploy, and all of their actuators had to work properly. Then the stage's descent trajectory engine burns (there were two, in addition to the terminal descent burn) all had to work--the engine(s) had to restart, run at the correct throttle settings for the correct durations (a little leeway for correction of such errors existed, but not much), and the engine(s)' steering actuators all had to operate properly; a "hard-over" would have ended the show. In addition:

The center engine--which is used for the terminal descent and touchdown--could not fail to restart, or shut down early, or have its throttle mechanism malfunction, or have any of its actuators fail, or it would have been "GAME OVER" for the landing attempt. And all throughout the first stage's re-entry, descent, and landing, its guidance system had to fly the vehicle through a narrow "corridor" (not unlike what the Apollo guidance system had to do when the Command Module re-entered at Earth escape velocity), and its roll control thrusters had to keep the stage stable in roll. The kerosene and LOX, in their mostly-empty tanks, also had to be kept from sloshing, as that could have caused loss of control. But the Falcon 9 first stage had a far more difficult task than the Apollo guidance system--it had to bring the stage not to a landing ellipse many miles across (which was good enough for the Command Modules' splashdowns), but to the equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field, a 170' X 300' barge 200 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. As well:

That the first stage actually landed on the barge, on the very first attempt (the V-2's designers would have loved to have achieved that level of accuracy in their missile, whose maximum range was also 200 miles--instead of having to settle for hitting *somewhere* in a large city, they could have targeted specific factories and government buildings!), was a miracle. Elon Musk and the SpaceX crew are delighted that they *did* "hit a postage stamp on a football field," and none of them fell asleep crying in their beer (or other preferred beverages) last night. Plus:

The only anomaly was a higher-than-desired touchdown velocity. But since they have previously soft-landed a first stage on the ocean surface, and their two first stage test vehicles have repeatedly demonstrated pin-point landings (not to mention quick stage turnaround and reusability), last night they proved that barge landings are feasible. Whatever caused the too-fast touchdown is not a fundamental flaw, but some overlooked item or items (or perhaps an untimely failure or "off-spec" function of some component) that will be found and corrected.
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Last edited by blackshire : 01-11-2015 at 12:01 AM.
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Old 01-11-2015, 08:28 AM
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So thinking out loud and thinking ahead:

Elon has a South Padre launch site and a contract at SpacePort America in New Mexico north of Hatch. Depending on what the cross range capacity is of a recovering Falcon9 booster, the barge landing may be a worst case scenario.

If we use 200 miles down range as the number, a launch from New Mexico stays in New Mexico on anything but a launch toward the equator which recovers in some very desolate and somewhat mountainous areas of far West Texas (trust me, I drive here all the time, there's nothing there). A polar orbit launched to the south would be recovered in equally desolate areas of Mexico; to the north would be in some fairly exciting terrain near Los Alamos . For example, a launch in the direction reported for yesterday's launch would recover near Tucumcari. If he can bounce it off a tiny ship, I know he could hit say, a 40-acre site in the scrub near Route 66.

The South Padre launch site would have recovery perhaps on a pre-prepared Texas Tower in the Gulf to the northeast but insufficient range to reach a recovery in Yucatan (or God help us, Cuba) to the southeast. The Gulf is pretty deep in that direction; back to the barge on that one.

If the cross-range capacity is higher to either extend down range further or to fly back farther toward the launch site then some of these suppositions will be incorrect. I do think the Mexican government would get behind a project like this for recovery in Yucatan or in the almost totally uninhabited areas of western Chihuahua or eastern Sonora . There are a lot of intangibles. But it does raise some interesting possibilities . . . .
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Old 01-11-2015, 09:50 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkB.
So thinking out loud and thinking ahead:

Elon has a South Padre launch site and a contract at SpacePort America in New Mexico north of Hatch. Depending on what the cross range capacity is of a recovering Falcon9 booster, the barge landing may be a worst case scenario.

If we use 200 miles down range as the number, a launch from New Mexico stays in New Mexico on anything but a launch toward the equator which recovers in some very desolate and somewhat mountainous areas of far West Texas (trust me, I drive here all the time, there's nothing there). A polar orbit launched to the south would be recovered in equally desolate areas of Mexico; to the north would be in some fairly exciting terrain near Los Alamos . For example, a launch in the direction reported for yesterday's launch would recover near Tucumcari. If he can bounce it off a tiny ship, I know he could hit say, a 40-acre site in the scrub near Route 66.

The South Padre launch site would have recovery perhaps on a pre-prepared Texas Tower in the Gulf to the northeast but insufficient range to reach a recovery in Yucatan (or God help us, Cuba) to the southeast. The Gulf is pretty deep in that direction; back to the barge on that one.

If the cross-range capacity is higher to either extend down range further or to fly back farther toward the launch site then some of these suppositions will be incorrect. I do think the Mexican government would get behind a project like this for recovery in Yucatan or in the almost totally uninhabited areas of western Chihuahua or eastern Sonora . There are a lot of intangibles. But it does raise some interesting possibilities . . . .
What/where is this South Padre site? I presume you aren't referring to the Boca Chica, Texas launch site, which is very close to the Mexican border but is in Texas. Also:

I think your overland launch/lower stage(s) landing corridor idea is entirely practical. Not only were Athena re-entry test vehicles launched from Green River, Utah to impact on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico--after overflying sparsely-populated, but populated nonetheless--areas, but such overflights are routinely conducted in Alaska today. From the Poker Flat Research Range (located 30 miles north of Fairbanks--I used to be the volunteer range historian), sounding rockets have long been flown over sparsely-populated areas of the state north of here, to impact not far south of the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Rewards are offered for rocket and payload parts that are found and brought back, so the people who live in the overflight corridors view it as "scavenger hunts with possible payoffs," and more than a few of them have come here and gone home with generous-size checks ($500.00, if memory serves) in their pockets. In addition:

No one has ever been hit by falling rockets or debris, even though hundreds of launches have occurred at Poker Flat since it opened in March of 1969. The closest call took place just a couple of miles up the road from the launch pad areas, where an errant Arcas impaled itself in the ground while still under thrust, just a few yards from the Chatanika Lodge, where range personnel often eat lunch! As well:

Downrange land touchdown sites would be easier to manage for the Falcon Heavy's two outboard boosters (landing them both on that barge would be...interesting, and providing two separate barges would be more expensive and difficult) and--if a suitable land site was in the right place--for the core's first stage. The second (Vacuum Merlin-powered) stage's landing site(s), once they get around to recovering those stages from orbit, may be easier to arrange for, since the de-orbit burn could be timed to bring the final stage to any convenient spot along or near its orbit's ground track. And:

The only part of the operation that seems unworkable--not because it's impossible (it isn't) but because it would require -so- much propellant that it would whittle down the final payload to orbit a *lot*--is the boost-back trajectory, which would return the first stage(s) to a landing zone near the launch site. But I haven't heard this option discussed by SpaceX for quite a while, so they may have abandoned it. Landing the lower stage(s) downrange is far more propellant-efficient. Plus:

Russia (and perhaps to a lesser extent, China) appear well-placed to implement such stage recovery, should they decide to do so, since they have largely overland ranges (they are watching SpaceX's work in this area with great interest). I can easily envision an uprated version of Russia's Angara launch vehicle, where the URMs (Universal Rocket Modules) land not far from convenient railroads, by which the landed rockets would be shipped back to the launch site for inspection, servicing, re-integration, and re-launch.
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