Interplanetary
The Japanese launched Ikaros five years ago next week.
598 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2008
My first thought was why not deploy the parachutes before dumping the trunk.
Because the capsule will be facing the wrong way and there would be a very high chance of the rigging getting tangled on the trunk leading to a Bad Day. Though I suppose if you've already needed to abort, getting the parachutes wrapped round the trunk would make it a Worse Day.
By one of those coincidences I had the radio going in my headphones mixed with the audio from the webcast. Just before SpaceX started their T-13 minute poll the radio started playing Public Service Broadcastings "Go!" so I had two teams 46 years apart polling.
Nicked from /., an unmanned Mercury abort comes down a similar distance offshore https://youtu.be/Vp9BnBDKa0s?t=5m55s
There are a couple of extra ATV service modules, currently intended to be used on Orion test flights. The pressurised bits came from the Alenia production line which I think also makes the Cygnus pressurised container. A bodge job ATV might be possible in under a year, but you'd still need an Ariane 5 to launch it and the only way you'd free up one of them would be to pay a commercial payload a very large sum of money to delay...
It's still not over land. For a geo-sync launch there are two burns, the first one finishes 9 minutes or so after launch and puts everything in a more or less circular orbit, the second is 10 minutes or so later starting just before it crosses the equator to put the payload in the transfer orbit. You'd need to be roughly in Cameroon to stand a chance of seeing it.
What success record did the Grasshopper and DC-X have when they started flying?
None. Which is why when they started flying they did so in the middle of big empty spaces with insufficient fuel or velocity to reach anywhere breakable. There's quite a bit of expensive and fragile kit hanging around the Cape that you don't want to land on top of...
Couple of still pictures on his Twitter feed now with the comment "Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing"
Also "All we have right now is low frame rate video (basically pictures). Normal video will be posted when ship returns to port in a few days."
Well they're obviously doing something right, with 16 Falcon 9 launches in 4 years so far, and 10 more this year.
10 more scheduled, there's bound to be slippage on some of them unfortunately. On the other hand the two launch abort tests for the crew Dragon and the Falcon Heavy demo flight don't appear to be included in that count.
Lockheed and Boeing are also now talking about their ULA Atlas and Delta replacement heading towards reusability, although also going for the FUD about how many times a stage needs to fly before it's cheaper to reuse than expend. Interestingly they've got a press conference due half an hour before the Falcon launch...
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.
They've got a pretty good idea of what will need to be checked and replaced from the Grasshopper tests. The first few stages to be recovered will be completely dismantled and inspected to confirm that, and to check what has been affected by the stresses of a full bore flight rather than the relatively gentle up and down of Grasshopper and its successors.
If you need to slow down enough to enter orbit when you get back to Earth, you have to haul the fuel to do that with you to Mars and back. You also need extra fuel to accelerate that fuel out of Mars orbit to get back, and extra fuel to decelerate both those quantities of fuel into Mars orbit when you get there, and still more to accelerate all three lots of fuel out of Earth orbit and towards mars in the first place.
Much less mass requirement to take your re-entry vehicle along with you, not bother with getting into Earth orbit when you get back, and use a beefy heat shield to re-enter directly.
Going through the belts is really a side issue, what they want to do is give the heat shield a good thrashing and for that the higher you go the faster the re-entry is. For LEO you're going around 17,500mph when you hit atmosphere, coming back from the moon or beyond it's more like 25,000mph.
Makes sense from the images. If you look at the picture of the incident, eg on http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Probe_of_US_spaceship_crash_may_take_year_999.html and now treat SS2 as being upside down and backwards you've got the engine still firing at the top and the tail booms deployed either side. The feathered configuration is supposed to hold the nose up during re-entry so the base of the ship is maximising the cross section, deploying while the engine is running is lilely to send you into a very tight loop the loop.
The SpaceX one was a first stage problem. They lost an engine on the way up so the other 8 ran longer, that left everything in slightly the wrong position so they couldn't do the second burn after the Dragon separated to get the Orbcomm secondary payload in the right orbit.
First stage engine problems aren't unusual, but they frequently show up before the rocket has left the ground so everything gets shut down and can be fixed.