My thoughts on this weekend’s mostly-successful flight over at PJMedia.
21 thoughts on “The Spaceship That Almost Landed”
Did they crump on landing? If so, they did better than many a VTOL project this far into it.
Was this part of an orbital mission, or was this a launch with dummy upper stages? Was the first-stage flight path in any way “depowered” for this test?
It was a CRS delivery flight to ISS. They’ll try it again at the end of the month on the DSCVR flight. My understanding is that it did not survive intact.
So you are saying that this was an orbital mission, the orbital delivery succeeded, but the first stage recovery was only partially successful because they crumped it on landing?
Yes, except they didn’t “crump” it. It didn’t survive.
Well, there are pictures of them removing the wreckage – various parts survived, after a fashion.
By the way, “crump” is the official aviation jargon for something short of a crash. A crash involves totally wrecking the vehicle along with serious injury to crew or worse. A crump is the aviation version of a fender-bender as in “Honest, Chief, I crumped that Harrier but I just loss power on my in the last few feet.”
Often times crumping an airplane results in a total loss. Jeff Skiles of the Miracle on the Hudson aircrew described what he did as “I just crashed an airplane”, but next time I see his Dad, I should offer the correction that the crew only just “crumped an airplane.” Even though the plane was “totalled”, it landed pretty much in one piece and with minimal harm apart from a crew member suffering a knee laceration.
Do we have any idea of the -scale- of the crash?
Fall from 1m? Fall from 5m? Fall from 50m? Fall from 500m?
We know it wasn’t from full speed or there’d be a large hole in the barge :D.
But how close was it to something “the pilot can walk away from”?
I think only SpaceX knows the answers to your questions and, to the best of my knowledge, they have not released any additional information yet. Being a private company, they’re under no obligation to do so but I hope they will tell us more.
The pieces that were removed were pretty big, but there was obvious blast damage on the barge. My guess is it was intact to the barge, fell over/split the tank, and the engine ignited the remaining fuel.
I don’t know what got me started thinking about this within the past 15 minutes or so, but I somehow started thinking of vacuums, which made me think about the A-3 test stand at Stennis, which made me think about the comment I made asking how one can test a rocket on earth in a “vacuum”, which eventually got me to this point:
If SpaceX can show a reusable first stage with the capabilities of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to be an economic reality, is there any chance that such a reusable first stage could then be used for lower-cost real-life LEO testing of second stages, obviating the need for projects like A-3 at Stennis? Or would the costs of such launches still be prohibitively expensive without another commercial package on-board for the flight or due to the risk of losing the second stage test vehicle?
The reason Stennis came to mind is, I think, because I asked at the time how many live flights could be made into space to test the vacuum-start capabilities of rocket engines vs. $350M spent on a completely unused test stand. At current prices, the answer is 5-7 launches, but would a resusable Stage 1 get even closer to such an idea making sense?
Or am I completely missing something else?
That’s an interesting idea, and let’s assume the engine in question has already had some significant testing at sea-level pressure for combustion stability, mechanics, and whatnot, they they just need some vacuum start, re-start,and burn testing.
Prior to testing it as an all-up second stage on a recoverable first stage, why not mount the second stage upside down, without even attempting a stage separation? Since only altitude is relevant for the test, there’s no need to go downrange. Have the Falcon 9R launch vertically, and as it reaches the proper altitude use the second stage engine (aimed upwards) to kill off the vertical velocity. If it fails, you still have the ability to dump second-stage fuel and recover the whole vehicle as would’ve otherwise been done, and if it burns to second-stage cutoff you’ve merely reduced the re-entry velocity that the second-stage has to cope with.
Rand, there’s a small error in your piece (Though the piece is great overall). You state that the F9 has to relight 9 engines to slow down. That’s incorrect. It relights three for the boostback burn, and then three for the braking burn, and then one for the landing. Lighting all 9 would put the F9 way past its G limit. The largest number of engines firing post second stage sep is three.
As an aside, I think one of the many firsts on this flight was the boostback burn; I think the prior splashdowns had a braking burn and landing burn only. The thing is, they didn’t need the boostback burn at all to land on the barge (they could have simply placed the barge further downrange). They thus made the attempt even more complex than it needed to be – which is exactly what you do if you’re doing a testing program. From where I sit, it looks as if SpaceX is doing a real, good-old-days, test program like the X programs of old.
The X-34 cancellation always sounded a bit screwy to me. If they cancelled more test flights because the prototype it did not have redundant avionics its nuts. I thought I heard the Fastrac engine development also hit a wall somewhere?
The decision to not fly X-34 was typical knee-jerk NASA management stupidity.
CNES, the company that builds Europe’s Ariane, recently announced its own project to make its vehicles reusable
No, No, No. CNES is the French national space research center. It is kind of like NASA. The equivalent in Germany would be the DLR. ESA is the European Space Agency which is transnational. CNES has a lot of pull in ESA.
The Ariane launchers are manufactured by Airbus Defence and Space (kinda of like Boeing or Lockheed Martin) and the engines by Snecma (Safran) (kind of like Rocketdyne or Aerojet). The company which does the launches is called Arianespace (kind of like ULA).
At a time ESA did studies to use reusable flyback boosters. Among others they considered using the Baikal flyback booster from the Russians to replace the solids on Ariane 5. That was what the guy from CNES was talking about. Given the current situation in Ukraine I doubt this has any chance of happening even if it was unlikely to begin with.
When ESA was starting the FLPP (Future Launchers Preparatory Program) to replace Ariane 5 they studied a lot of different vehicle configurations. CNES eventually pressed a reusable TSTO configuration using LOX/Methane and LOX/LH2 staged combustion respectively on the 1st and 2nd stage. They did some small engine tests with the Russians since Europe does not have experience with staged combustion like the Russians do. This was similar to the USA SLI program. The engines were supposed to fulfill similar purpose to the RS-84 and RS-83 from Rocketdyne. Eventually the funding was pulled.
They also had plans for a solid powered rocket with three stages at one point in the 1990s which they called the Lyra program which was supposed to be based on the Vega rocket only bigger. For whatever reason, I don’t know maybe they’re trying to copy the Ares I rocket, Lyra grew a lot bigger into the turd that is Ariane 6.
The EU bureaucrats are not interested in spending a lot of money, what with the economic downturn and all, but it is still a bit degrading having to rely on Russian Soyuz launches from Kourou to launch Galileo satnav satellites economically. So someone managed to convince them that Ariane 6 would be cheaper than Ariane 5.
If they did the restartable second stage for Ariane 5, like was originally planned, the argument would be deflated as then you could do multiple launches of Galileo satellites with Ariane 5. Of course if for whatever reason you only wanted to replace a single satellite you would still have the same problem. Plus the scheduling of flights with multiple satellites is a lot more complicated.
From what I heard people in the French CNES had been pushing for the Ariane 6 design because it has synergies with the SLBM program and they probably think they can do it faster and with less R&D costs. The German DLR is pushing for the Ariane 5 ME upgrade. I can tell you why: the Ariane 5 liquid propellant tanks are manufactured in Germany and the solids IIRC were developed in France and are manufactured in Italy and Kourou.
Most of the ESA funding comes from France, Germany and Italy so those are the countries which will basically decide on what will happen.
The comment about the first spaceship to return to earth since shuttle seems a bit hyperbole. I’m not sure what the qualifiers are for spaceship, but Dragon has returned and so did CEV (or a chunk of boilerplate called the CEV). If by Earth, you mean solid ground, then Soyuz does that routinely, so does X-34. However, it will be the first powered spacecraft to return to earth with its primary thrusters intact since shuttle, and that is no small thing.
Dragon splashed down. So did CEV. I’m using the criteria of leaving the atmosphere as a “space ship.” I suppose Soyuz would sort of qualify, but it’s not intended to be reused.
It was primarily a nit…. still (and I got this wrong earlier) the X-37 does pretty much what the shuttle did, but without bringing back the expensive SSMEs, just the OMS, and then is reused. Again, what SpaceX is doing is huge. Imagine pairing the Falcon9 with X-37.
You’re right, I’d forgotten about X-37.
Perhaps Spacex will use the first successfully returned stage as the new test vehicle, to replace the one that went boom.
Did they crump on landing? If so, they did better than many a VTOL project this far into it.
Was this part of an orbital mission, or was this a launch with dummy upper stages? Was the first-stage flight path in any way “depowered” for this test?
It was a CRS delivery flight to ISS. They’ll try it again at the end of the month on the DSCVR flight. My understanding is that it did not survive intact.
So you are saying that this was an orbital mission, the orbital delivery succeeded, but the first stage recovery was only partially successful because they crumped it on landing?
Yes, except they didn’t “crump” it. It didn’t survive.
Well, there are pictures of them removing the wreckage – various parts survived, after a fashion.
By the way, “crump” is the official aviation jargon for something short of a crash. A crash involves totally wrecking the vehicle along with serious injury to crew or worse. A crump is the aviation version of a fender-bender as in “Honest, Chief, I crumped that Harrier but I just loss power on my in the last few feet.”
Often times crumping an airplane results in a total loss. Jeff Skiles of the Miracle on the Hudson aircrew described what he did as “I just crashed an airplane”, but next time I see his Dad, I should offer the correction that the crew only just “crumped an airplane.” Even though the plane was “totalled”, it landed pretty much in one piece and with minimal harm apart from a crew member suffering a knee laceration.
Do we have any idea of the -scale- of the crash?
Fall from 1m? Fall from 5m? Fall from 50m? Fall from 500m?
We know it wasn’t from full speed or there’d be a large hole in the barge :D.
But how close was it to something “the pilot can walk away from”?
I think only SpaceX knows the answers to your questions and, to the best of my knowledge, they have not released any additional information yet. Being a private company, they’re under no obligation to do so but I hope they will tell us more.
The pieces that were removed were pretty big, but there was obvious blast damage on the barge. My guess is it was intact to the barge, fell over/split the tank, and the engine ignited the remaining fuel.
I don’t know what got me started thinking about this within the past 15 minutes or so, but I somehow started thinking of vacuums, which made me think about the A-3 test stand at Stennis, which made me think about the comment I made asking how one can test a rocket on earth in a “vacuum”, which eventually got me to this point:
If SpaceX can show a reusable first stage with the capabilities of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to be an economic reality, is there any chance that such a reusable first stage could then be used for lower-cost real-life LEO testing of second stages, obviating the need for projects like A-3 at Stennis? Or would the costs of such launches still be prohibitively expensive without another commercial package on-board for the flight or due to the risk of losing the second stage test vehicle?
The reason Stennis came to mind is, I think, because I asked at the time how many live flights could be made into space to test the vacuum-start capabilities of rocket engines vs. $350M spent on a completely unused test stand. At current prices, the answer is 5-7 launches, but would a resusable Stage 1 get even closer to such an idea making sense?
Or am I completely missing something else?
That’s an interesting idea, and let’s assume the engine in question has already had some significant testing at sea-level pressure for combustion stability, mechanics, and whatnot, they they just need some vacuum start, re-start,and burn testing.
Prior to testing it as an all-up second stage on a recoverable first stage, why not mount the second stage upside down, without even attempting a stage separation? Since only altitude is relevant for the test, there’s no need to go downrange. Have the Falcon 9R launch vertically, and as it reaches the proper altitude use the second stage engine (aimed upwards) to kill off the vertical velocity. If it fails, you still have the ability to dump second-stage fuel and recover the whole vehicle as would’ve otherwise been done, and if it burns to second-stage cutoff you’ve merely reduced the re-entry velocity that the second-stage has to cope with.
Rand, there’s a small error in your piece (Though the piece is great overall). You state that the F9 has to relight 9 engines to slow down. That’s incorrect. It relights three for the boostback burn, and then three for the braking burn, and then one for the landing. Lighting all 9 would put the F9 way past its G limit. The largest number of engines firing post second stage sep is three.
As an aside, I think one of the many firsts on this flight was the boostback burn; I think the prior splashdowns had a braking burn and landing burn only. The thing is, they didn’t need the boostback burn at all to land on the barge (they could have simply placed the barge further downrange). They thus made the attempt even more complex than it needed to be – which is exactly what you do if you’re doing a testing program. From where I sit, it looks as if SpaceX is doing a real, good-old-days, test program like the X programs of old.
The X-34 cancellation always sounded a bit screwy to me. If they cancelled more test flights because the prototype it did not have redundant avionics its nuts. I thought I heard the Fastrac engine development also hit a wall somewhere?
The decision to not fly X-34 was typical knee-jerk NASA management stupidity.
CNES, the company that builds Europe’s Ariane, recently announced its own project to make its vehicles reusable
No, No, No. CNES is the French national space research center. It is kind of like NASA. The equivalent in Germany would be the DLR. ESA is the European Space Agency which is transnational. CNES has a lot of pull in ESA.
The Ariane launchers are manufactured by Airbus Defence and Space (kinda of like Boeing or Lockheed Martin) and the engines by Snecma (Safran) (kind of like Rocketdyne or Aerojet). The company which does the launches is called Arianespace (kind of like ULA).
At a time ESA did studies to use reusable flyback boosters. Among others they considered using the Baikal flyback booster from the Russians to replace the solids on Ariane 5. That was what the guy from CNES was talking about. Given the current situation in Ukraine I doubt this has any chance of happening even if it was unlikely to begin with.
When ESA was starting the FLPP (Future Launchers Preparatory Program) to replace Ariane 5 they studied a lot of different vehicle configurations. CNES eventually pressed a reusable TSTO configuration using LOX/Methane and LOX/LH2 staged combustion respectively on the 1st and 2nd stage. They did some small engine tests with the Russians since Europe does not have experience with staged combustion like the Russians do. This was similar to the USA SLI program. The engines were supposed to fulfill similar purpose to the RS-84 and RS-83 from Rocketdyne. Eventually the funding was pulled.
They also had plans for a solid powered rocket with three stages at one point in the 1990s which they called the Lyra program which was supposed to be based on the Vega rocket only bigger. For whatever reason, I don’t know maybe they’re trying to copy the Ares I rocket, Lyra grew a lot bigger into the turd that is Ariane 6.
The EU bureaucrats are not interested in spending a lot of money, what with the economic downturn and all, but it is still a bit degrading having to rely on Russian Soyuz launches from Kourou to launch Galileo satnav satellites economically. So someone managed to convince them that Ariane 6 would be cheaper than Ariane 5.
If they did the restartable second stage for Ariane 5, like was originally planned, the argument would be deflated as then you could do multiple launches of Galileo satellites with Ariane 5. Of course if for whatever reason you only wanted to replace a single satellite you would still have the same problem. Plus the scheduling of flights with multiple satellites is a lot more complicated.
From what I heard people in the French CNES had been pushing for the Ariane 6 design because it has synergies with the SLBM program and they probably think they can do it faster and with less R&D costs. The German DLR is pushing for the Ariane 5 ME upgrade. I can tell you why: the Ariane 5 liquid propellant tanks are manufactured in Germany and the solids IIRC were developed in France and are manufactured in Italy and Kourou.
Most of the ESA funding comes from France, Germany and Italy so those are the countries which will basically decide on what will happen.
The comment about the first spaceship to return to earth since shuttle seems a bit hyperbole. I’m not sure what the qualifiers are for spaceship, but Dragon has returned and so did CEV (or a chunk of boilerplate called the CEV). If by Earth, you mean solid ground, then Soyuz does that routinely, so does X-34. However, it will be the first powered spacecraft to return to earth with its primary thrusters intact since shuttle, and that is no small thing.
Dragon splashed down. So did CEV. I’m using the criteria of leaving the atmosphere as a “space ship.” I suppose Soyuz would sort of qualify, but it’s not intended to be reused.
It was primarily a nit…. still (and I got this wrong earlier) the X-37 does pretty much what the shuttle did, but without bringing back the expensive SSMEs, just the OMS, and then is reused. Again, what SpaceX is doing is huge. Imagine pairing the Falcon9 with X-37.
You’re right, I’d forgotten about X-37.
Perhaps Spacex will use the first successfully returned stage as the new test vehicle, to replace the one that went boom.