Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an Electron rocket descending to the ocean? New Zealand's Rocket Lab is set to launch another Electron rocket - a precursor to the rocketeer's first attempt at catching a descending booster. The Register caught up with CEO Peter Beck to discuss helicopters, Mars and visiting Venus. The launch, dubbed "Love at First Insight", is currently scheduled for no earlier than 16 …
Look up "Lossless Convexification of Nonconvex Control Bound and Pointing Constraints of the Soft Landing Optimal Control Problem" which is a 2013 IEEE paper. One of the authors is with SpaceX
Holy O'Fuck. I've played lots of KSP, but that math left me far, far behind. Like talking quantum physics to a sheep, far behind.
I don't even really understand what the title means, except it's somehow "how to land rockets on barges without earth-shattering kabooms"
The bios of the authors at the end are especially entertaining.
I know the military have retrieved film canisters and occasionally people using the helicopter / plane catch technique.
But when you a dealing with a rocket motor that is completely different - these things have got to weigh multiple tonnes in weight and the snatch as it is caught….
All I can say is they must be very good pilots
I'd guess that there are good helicopter pilots and dead ones with a small overlap on the Venn diagram. I heard a tale from someone who saw a pilot put a teabag in in a mug from a helicopter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Probably just bollocks, but a nice story.
Remember that the Electron is rather small, will have lost all its fuel and be descending via parachute. Still don't think I'd want to be on that particular ride when they actually try it.
They are only catching the empty first stage, which being mostly made of carbon fiber has a dry weight of only 0.95 metric tons, according to this spec sheet. http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/electron.html
It may have some small amount of unspent fuel onboard, but it's also yeeted a couple hundred kilograms of battery on it's ascent. so may be lighter that the dry weight which likely included the batteries.
NZ does have very good chopper pilots. They are used a lot there. For mustering sheep on some of the big high country stations for eg. For search and rescue missions as well like plucking an injured crewman off a fishing boat down in the Roaring 40’s. They’ve plucked people off high alpine peaks, they routinely put conservation rangers etc down in otherwise inaccessible places and pick them up again. You can go heli skiing on the glaciers.
And your pilot might be Captain Fantastic himself Richie McCaw in his post rugby job.
When the USAF were catching film from their spy sats they generally used fixed wing aircraft, rather than helicopters.
As a comparison, the film-buckets for a KH-9 Hexagon weighed ~400kg and could contain an additional 200kg of film (according to wikipedia), which is roughly in the ballpark of a spent Electron stage.
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