They’re going to depressurize and repressurize the BEAM tomorrow morning. They seem to think that the material was just stiff from storage.
Meanwhile, less than a half an hour until today’s launch and landing attempt. The ship is on station, despite the growing tropical depression in the area. They don’t really have anything to lose from the attempt, unless the ship itself is at risk from the weather, but it’s not even a storm yet. The live feed is up, unlike yesterday.
[Update a while later]
OK, another perfect mission and landing. We’re rapidly approaching the point at which we’ll be surprised if they don’t recover the stage.
3 in a row for SpaceX!
Yeehar! They landed again! I know it isn’t easy but they are starting to make it look that way.
Loved the shot from the top of the first stage as it did the re-entry burn.
Maybe next time we’ll see the landing burn from the same view.
Mike, they just posted the F9 view, all the way down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jEz03Z8azc
I wish they hadn’t sped it up. There’s another somewhere of a Flacon’s eye view of a daylight landing on the ASDS, it’s spectacular too.
Thanks. Awesome.
From a comment on NASA watch
“Click on the gear icon in the YouTube video menu, and select “speed”. Set the speed to 0.25 X (25% speed). At the 00.19 mark, you can see that the landing ship/barge becomes partially visible through the left grid fin, at approx. the ten o’clock position. At the 00:20 mark, the 1st stage makes a slight correction, moving the visual perspective such that the grid fin no longer obscures the barge.”
They nailed it! 4 successful landings now 🙂
Space Flight Now wasn’t too big on the landing. It mentioned it a few times, but it took awhile reading the article for me to be certain it landed. Probably a good thing that it is becoming old hat. No need to be complacent, but it does need to become common enough to make SLS look like a buggy whip.
SLS looks like a buggy whip even if SpaceX was still throwing stages away.
They’ll soon have to buy more property just to store used stages! Way. To. Go. SpaceX.
Even if they manage to reuse just the engines it should be a huge savings overall.
I do want to know if this stage suffered thermal damage (rendering it unreusable) like the last one, or if they’ve found a way to mitigate that. Even in the event that happened it could be salvaged for parts, though.
I did hear once, I think it was some VTVL info, that if you throttled down the engines while going down the atmosphere but still kept enough thrust up, you could basically create a heatshield with the engine plasma to minimize engine damage upon reentry. That’s why some early VTVL designs had that large nozzle covering the entire base of the rocket. A rocket nozzle is already designed for high temperature operations by definition so you would minimize heath shield mass.
It’s only designed for high temp operations if it has fuel flowing through the channels around the engine bell constantly, so yeah, you’d need to have the throttle going the whole time to take advantage of that.
Apparently one of the legs was damaged by the hard landing and the stage is tilting slightly. Elon tweeted that there is some risk of it toppling. I wonder whether it is safe to put a crew aboard to secure it under these conditions?
Still, it’s great to see them constantly pushing the envelope to learn what they can get away with. Maybe they can still scavenge parts from the stages that make hot re-entries and can’t be reused. Plus, data, data, and more data!
They have to put a crew aboard at some point; there’s currently no way to hook up the tow line without doing so.
Can someone explain the “core crush”?
Always fun watching SpaceX do its stuff.
The leg struts have an aluminum honeycomb crushable shock absorbing material in them, much like what was used in the lunar module legs. It’s a use-once material.
I don’t know if this stuff can be replaced by itself, or if the entire leg assembly is intended to be replaced when they reuse a stage.