Business, Space, Technology and Society

Because Failure Is An Option

12 Comments

SpaceX can do stuff like land a rocket on a boat.

I was surprised at the success last night, because Elon had been downplaying chances. I think he may have been a little surprised, too.

Worth noting the trend here: SpaceX is getting better at this. As noted, the rapid deceleration of the three-engine retroburn will be useful experience for Mars.

[Update a few minutes later]

“SpaceX is incrementally moving towards making landings such as these mundane.”

Meanwhile, NASA is spending billions so they can throw a giant rocket away in a couple years.

12 thoughts on “Because Failure Is An Option”

  1. The only real point of the quicker deceleration is to prep for mars. They don’t need it for earth landings. I just hope they give the dragons enough fuel margin. For humans it will be quite the ride. First they get down to a low mars altitude at high mach for the thicker atmosphere. Then they travel hundreds of miles horizontally bleeding energy until reaching a low enough speed to then drop propulsively the remaining distance to ground. A real E ticket ride (youngsters won’t get the reference.)

    1. The only real point of the quicker deceleration is to prep for mars. They don’t need it for earth landings.

      They needed it for this landing.

  2. Fantastic! Now they’ve demonstrated first stage recovery for both LEO and GTO launches.

    The next big milestone will be re-flying one of these recovered cores, which I gather may happen this summer or fall.

    There’s another launch scheduled for later this month, and three for June. If they keep landing first stages they’re going to have quite a stack of them piled up.

  3. >Meanwhile, NASA is spending billions so they can throw a giant rocket away in a couple years.

    Well, if they didn’t throw them away, they couldn’t keep building them, could they? Maybe the point is 0% losses, and 0 flights lets that happen. Safest. Rocket. Evar.

  4. The high acceleration landing may also mean stages with fewer engines can be recovered this way.

  5. I’m amazed that the 3 engine burn has so much advantage over a single engine burn. The gravity losses on the initial retro burn can’t be that high surely which leaves us with the gravity looses just for the landing.
    Am I right that there were only 2 burns to recover the booster on yesterday’s flight?

    1. No boostback burn, but I don’t know if there was an initial burn to align the booster with the location of the landing ship. I imagine they have a sufficiently good idea of entry dynamics now so that may not have been necessary, if they preposition the ship properly.

      The faster they come down, the more energy they will lose to drag (drag goes as v^2, typically, and rate of energy loss to drag as v^3), so the less impulse will have to be delivered by the engines at the end. This may be the biggest effect.

  6. I know how NASA will save the SLS program from the Falcon Heavy menace!
    NASA will rename SLS the Trump Rocket. Unless of course Hillary is elected.

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