SpaceX HOVER-SHIP landing scuppered by MASSIVE ocean waves Upstart startup rocketbiz SpaceX has launched its Falcon 9 rocket carrying aloft NASA's sun-sniffing DSCOVR satellite – which is destined to take up position beyond Earth's orbit and warn humanity of dangerous solar storms. Sadly, extreme sea weather has prevented SpaceX from attempting to land the lower stage of the reusable …
And there is whole lot of fun to be had if this is an ongoing trend; plenty more ship names to choose from, some eerily appropriate. (e.g. Oceanic Dissonance or Just Testing)
Personally, I wish he'd called one of these barges Pure Big Mad Boat Man.
Regardless, I hope SpaceX continue to experiment and innovate. Genuinely interesting times.
I'd say the next one should be called Just Testing. After all, thats what they are currently doing.
Although "So much for subtlety" would also work marvelously.
"Funny, It Worked Last Time..." and "The Precise Nature Of The Catastrophe" would be awesome names, but possible a bit... hard to explain to investors.
"and the faring jettison from a camera on the ground"
Yes, my jaw nearly hit the desk when I saw that - some seriously good optics there.
...
I was puzzled by Mr. Musk's Merlin engine comment though. I had visions of
"Tally ho, tally ho, this is 'Just read the Instructions.' Bandits at 3 O'clock, angels 20. Keep your eyes peeled chaps, they're coming out of the sun."
in the finest of Battle of Britain accents before I realised I was being a bit fick and he meant the other, ever-so-slightly more modern Merlin engine...
We may now have to wait until April for the next recovery attempt. There's a launch due on Feb 27th which is a heavy payload so won't have the fuel margin for a recovery attempt, and I believe the same applies to the Turkmensat launch due in late March. Jason 3 on March 31st is going up from Vandenberg which would probably need the "Of Course I Still Love You" to be ready, so it's the Dragon to the ISS currently due up on April 8th for the next try.
And what a birthday present it would be for me if they get it right on the 8th of April! Would be the best present, simply because it would be on my birthday that some clever boffins proved that humanity is still capable of more than wasting their brains on destruction, and once again have done something simply because it makes sense, and will be better for humankind!
Wishing SpaceX the best of luck! (On whatever date they try again!)
Consider that they are basically filling in the schedule gap created by Orbital Sciences oops. I can't see where any of what they've done could even remotely be considered a failure. Fifty foot waves would create problems even for a carrier so the landing pad wouldn't have been a good idea. I do like the idea of a Merlin engine on it though...
...especially now that SpaceX has leased one of the original Atlas launch facilities a bit further along the coast - Launch Complex 13 to become Landing Pad... so, they launch from LC40 or similar and land at LC13.
They still do - there was a good BBC documentary on recently "Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race"*, and the presenter joined the ground crews at they raced to meet the just-landed crew capsule.
However, SpaceX aren't trying to land a relatively inert crew capsule - they are trying to land a rocket stage - with fuel still on board. Landing at sea avoids all sorts of potential bureaucratic headaches and potential PR cock-ups (just in case the rocket stage lands on top of a lone hiker or rare animal), and the rocket stage can be recovered from the sea with less damage - so SpaceX can discover why it didn't land as planned.
*Another highlight was an interview with Alexey Leonov, the first man to conduct an EVA (commentated by Arthur C Clarke in his novel 2010: Odyssey 2.)
They've managed to hit a 100 square-meter boat bobbing up and down in the sea, at night. Perhaps they could do so for their launch out of Vandenberg and attempt to land in New Mexico and Nevada where there is quite a lot of open spaces and old testing ranges that wouldn't have anybody hanging around. If they land the bits in Nevada, they could always make some extra scratch by placing a target out in the desert and set up a bet on how close it'll get.
If they can make it to Arizona, they could set it down in the Yuma Proving Grounds where its expected that things coming down will blow up.
Overall, they'd learn a lot more if they can recover all the pieces and try for a dry, stationary target.
Didn't they have one rocket break up at the hypersonic stage, sometime early last year? They've had 3 or 4 successes since, where they've got down to ground (ocean) level in controlled flight, and where they were aiming for. But will probably have to succeed a few more times first.
Although this attempt will have helped them, as the 1st stage was going considerably faster this time, and yet they still managed to get it down to where they wanted it, in controlled flight.
However, flying across the continental US, where the rocket has to be under sufficient control to avoid air-corridors even if everything works (let alone cities), is probably a long way away. Much more reliable drones don't generally have permission to fly in civillian airspace. I'd imagine that what they can get permission for is flying in designated ranges out to sea, and then popping back to some nice landing spot on the coast. After a few years of success at that, they may be able to achieve more.
I wonder what the New York - London time would be in a Falcon/Dragon combo? OK the cost would be obscene, but it'd make a superb PR stunt.
> Didn't they have one rocket break up at the hypersonic stage, sometime early last year?
Nope - the first three Falcon 1 launches failed (they were basically test launches), and the forth Falcon 9 launch had one of the 9 engines shut down early meaning that the primary payload reached the ISS, but the secondary one could not be put into its orbit without getting too close to the ISS on the way (so ended up in a short-lived orbit). All the other launches have worked fine.
The DSCOVR satellite was not Gore's idea. The need for warming about solar flares to protect our cranky 1920's power grid goes back much further than that, What Gore did was to initially suggest that the satellite carry a camera that would photograph the Earth and send the pictures back. This really had no scientific gravitas and was intended to be purely "inspirational" and dismissed by scientists at NASA. But then someone realized that if a camera was included, it would be then very easy to measure the Earth's albedo and calculate the net gain/loss of heat. This was important because other images had to be taken at different times ands then stitched together to make a composite that was around plus-or-minus 15% in accuracy. By being able to see the earth in detail in one shot would fix that and had the potential to end the anthropogenic global warming debate permanently.
When word of the albedo-measuring capability got back to the people behind global warming denial, they immediately put huge pressure on NASA (via their budget) and Congressmen to shelve the project, which they did. But by down-playing the albedo-measuring capability and emphasizing the need for better solar flare warning, NASA has launched the satellite almost covertly. The satellite has been mothballed for years (at a cost of millions a year) and was quietly taken out of storage, refurbished (for a few more millions), and launched.
Now the deniers can start denying once again, but this time in the face of hard data as to the Earth's net heat gain that cannot be accounted for by solar activity.
"Now the deniers can start denying once again, but this time in the face of hard data as to the Earth's net heat gain that cannot be accounted for by solar activity."
I had to read this twice because of the stupidity of it.
If the heat isn't coming from the Sun, where is it coming from? There is no net heat gain! If so we would have turned into molten blobs eons ago!
The Earth's temp is in a remarkable equilibrium.
Look at this graph...
https://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/image266.png
See?
I didn't say the heat was coming from the sun. In fact it is the deniers who say that it is a natural cycle caused by the sun. By measuring the exact amount of sunlight striking the Earth and the amount reflected, solar influence can be ruled out. Global warming is a net heat gain because the heat is held in and not reflected back out.
I really don't waste my time on wordpress blogs with idiotic presumptions that make no sense. The rate of increase in heat is coming from somewhere --- maybe anthropogenic global warming? 2014 was the hottest year on record. in fact, all the hottest ten years have happened since 2000.
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