
SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time - Perados
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/08/spacex-just-landed-a-rocket-on-a-drone-ship-for-the-first-time/
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263)

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rootlocus
Seeing this puts my daily job in another perspective. Engineers at SpaceX can
launch a rocket, deliver the cargo, and safely land it ON A FREAKING MOVING
PLATFORM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING SEA perfectly, and I can't write a
stupid UI that doesn't break some unit tests.

I've become so used to writing (and working with) less than perfect (sloppy)
software, I'm ashamed to be called an engineer (not that anyone calls me
that). I wouldn't be able to write software that lands a rocket anywhere
without first crashing ~100 prototypes.

~~~
SonicSoul
I agree 100%. After reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a
Fantastic Future" I was really blown away by what kinds of problems the
engineers at spaceX deal with. It makes my job as software engineer seem like
a monkey with a typewriter could do it. It's many levels of magnitude more
complex and there are no frameworks to just download and leverage. you're
pretty much constantly inventing new stuff.

edit, one example of the kind of problems they deal with: initial rocket
testing was done on an island near Hawaii, so the engineers had to build their
own living space and stay there full time rolling out this big heavy rocket
onto an open field for testing and then rolling it back into it's hangar every
day in grueling heat. they'd work 15 hr days which was pretty much expected
and thankless. when there was component failure Elon would use his Jet to get
parts at radio shack in a different state and fly it over to CA for testing,
and then straight to the island speed up the work. Something that would take
NASA months would take SpaceX days or weeks since they didn't need "space
grade" components but instead used common parts. They'd just ensure that those
parts passed enough tests that they could be confident of the quality.

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dmix
Oh interesting. First time hearing about this book.

Amazon link for anyone interested: [http://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-
Fantastic-Future/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-
Future/dp/0062301233/)

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crispyambulance
Here's one thing I don't understand... The rocket lands upon a floating
platform in the ocean. Presumably the platform rocks along with the waves. How
do they keep the rocket from tipping over after the landing? If it were as
huge as an aircraft carrier I can imagine that it might be possible but the
platform is relatively small.

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pveierland
Elon mentioned at the news conference that the pitch/roll of the ship was 2-3
degrees for this landing, and that it should be easy to handle twice that,
with a maximum of about 8-9 degrees.

[https://youtu.be/VNygOavo2mY?t=934](https://youtu.be/VNygOavo2mY?t=934)

~~~
cr1895
That's insane. In offshore heavy lift we stick to barge motion limits around 2
degrees. Maybe we're just far more risk averse, but I cannot fathom how this
would work with 8-9 degrees rotation. Even being on a ship with 2-3 degrees
rotation you really feel like you're walking up and down a hill.

~~~
pcl
The barges are autonomous. The lack of people on board presumably
significantly increases their tolerance for rough seas, both in terms of risk
of human life and tolerance for human factors like seasickness and ability to
perform labor in a bumpy environment.

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cr1895
That's true but there still have to be people coming aboard to seafasten the
rocket. To my knowledge it's not welding itself to the deck.

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stcredzero
If not already, this seems like a job that could be done by specially designed
robots.

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savagej
Falcon 9. On a boat.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA)

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jshap70
apparently Elon tweeted this, but it has since been deleted.

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manaskarekar
Here's some information about the drone ships themselves:

[https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/06/spacex-augments-
upgr...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/06/spacex-augments-upgrades-
drone-ship-armada/)

Some pictures of Marmac 303 :
[http://www.worldmarine.com/projects/barges](http://www.worldmarine.com/projects/barges)

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esmi
Presumably once it gets "cheap" to launch stuff many projects which were
uneconomic become possible. Does this mean low earth orbit gets overcrowded
rapidly? Is there an international space traffic control? I wonder if this
will be another area where the regulation is as tough a problem as the tech.

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helicon
I think it already is pretty overcrowded and this has become a problem that
NASA/ESA and others are thinking about. Here is a good ESA video on space
debris:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs)

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username223
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is it better to land the rocket on a
ship instead of having it plop into the ocean and float for a few hours or
days until a nearby ship can scoop it up?

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Klathmon
The sea is filled with all kinds of stuff that pretty much ruins anything it
gets into.

The cost of cleaning, refitting, and fixing issues from a splash landing is
more expensive than doing it this way. At least that's what SpaceX's whole
model is pretty much based on.

~~~
username223
Thanks. I'm just surprised that the cost of damage from seawater to a dumb
rocket with a parachute and floats is more than the cost of a smart rocket
making a much more error-prone landing on a tiny ship.

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madlag
There is no such thing as a dumb rocket : to get down, they are using almost
exactly the same stuff they use to get up, weight wise: they use the gimbaled
engines, and the nitrogen attitude thrusters. The only additional devices are
the grid fins, to control aerodynamically the descent, and the legs. Then you
have to write the right software, and it does not weight much more ;-)

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samstave
Is this the first rocket with legs?

Seems like every thing else in history has really been a missile. This thing
can land, so seems like it's literally the first rocket. Do we have a
definition of missile vs rocket?

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ygra
A missile historically has been anything that was thrown or launched. Nowadays
it usually means a self-propelled weapon.

A rocket is just something with a rocket engine. Note that missiles do not
need to use rocket engines and rockets don't need to carry warheads.

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ablation
Very Iain M Banks-esque name for that drone ship. Is Musk a fan?

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vermontdevil
Yep. He named all these barges after the ships in the book series.

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Roritharr
I always wondered if he'd consider reading such SciFi a waste of time.

Happy to see that he enjoys those books aswell as I do.

~~~
j2bax
After reading his biography, I came to realize Musk loves video games and
books of all sorts. He thought about going into video game development when he
was younger but didn't think he could have as much of an impact on the world
in that line of work. He was featured in a gamer magazine around age 12 for a
scifi game he developed. He brings the term work hard play harder to a new
level!

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dyarosla
I can't seem to find the answer to this anywhere: Why did the Stage 1 not land
on the midpoint on the drone ship (which has seemed to be the goal of all the
other landings)? Did SpaceX take a page from Blue Origin and not aim for a
perfectly mid-point landing to increase the chance of it surviving?

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rebootthesystem
> not aim for a perfectly mid-point landing

That was a perfect landing.

As far as not aiming for the center. Of course it is aiming for the center.
That's where you have the greatest margins. Yet, this is nothing like what
Blue Origin has been doing. The comparison is simply not warranted.

Rather than go into a long explanation I'll just give you this data point:

Blue Origin is FALLING down from zero velocity. It reaches a terminal velocity
of around 300 to 400 miles per hour. It uses fins to navigate down to a spot
that, for all intents and purposes, is almost straight down.

Falcon 9 is FLYING down from somewhere around 17,000 miles per hour. During
that time it has to flip around and use three of it's engines to slow down
enough not to burn-up on re-entry. The grid fins also need to fly the rocket
to a ship, in the middle of the ocean, about 600 miles from the coast...and
then use a precisely timed single engine burn to land it.

Here are a couple of pictures to further illustrate the point:

[http://goo.gl/BT92J8](http://goo.gl/BT92J8)

[https://goo.gl/9Vttob](https://goo.gl/9Vttob)

Like I said. Perfect landing.

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dyarosla
Yes, it's clearly nothing like what Blue Origin is doing and the landing was
perfect. You're arguing against something I never said. My question was
specifically about the centering, which up until this point, SpaceX had always
seemed to land (and aimed to land) right on target. This time it was not
centered, and I wanted to know if anything had changed.

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rebootthesystem
This ain't software. Contact with the real world with physical things
introduces, among other things, variability. They didn't aim to land 25 feet
from the edge of the ship, it just happened. Can they do better. Probably.
Give them time. Just don't expect perfection.

A perfect landing is one where you get to recover and reuse the rocket. It was
perfect.

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jakozaur
We will be talking about this milestone (first reusable space rockets) the
same way my parents talked about first step on the moon.

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danbruc
Nope. I don't want to diminish this great technological achievement in any way
but this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. Actually I am not
even sure that setting foot on Mars will top the Moon, in some sense it's the
same thing. And yes, I am aware of the huge difference between Moon and Mars.
The first permanent human outpost, whether on the Moon, on Mars or elsewhere,
may be the next step after going to the Moon and living in space stations that
doesn't have the feel of an incremental step.

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omni
> this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon.

You're right, this landing is a _much_ bigger deal long-term. The Apollo
program proved that one of the world superpowers, with a decades-long
presidential mandate and a giant, massive bucket of funding, could do
incredible things.[1] It was awesome, and it's clearly one of the defining
moments in human history. However, the pace of space travel actually
_decreased_ after the Apollo program.[2] This probably had something to do
with the fact that nobody wanted to spend untold billions of dollars to keep
doing this stuff. The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big
deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment.

The whole Mars objective of SpaceX probably isn't going to be their lasting
contribution to humanity. All their technological achievements so far pale in
comparison to how hard it will be to live on Mars. They may well fail.
However, the reusability improvements they are making have significant
potential to increase the rate of space flight for the rest of our existence.
That's a gift-that-keeps-on-giving big deal, and enables all sorts of options
that were prohibitively expensive before. We're all really hoping the graph in
[2] starts spiking up soon.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_program)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_rates)

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TeMPOraL
> _decades-long presidential mandate_

A small note to put things into perspective: moon landing happened only 12 (!)
years after Sputnik. It happened only 8 (!) years after Kennedy's speech and
Gagarin's first space walk. The first launch of actual Apollo equipment was
3.5 years before the manned landing.

In other words: humans went from launching the first satellite to putting
people on the Moon in 12 years. In 8 years from first person in space to first
person on the Moon.

That's the speed of _focused_ progress. Something we very much lack these
days.

~~~
philjohn
We've also got a much lower appetite for risk.

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timdiggerm
Challenger _really_ screwed things up

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ska
I don't think that's true, or rather it didn't help but it's not the problem.
The program wasn't doing so many interesting things before Challenger, either.

I think the "space race" was born with the seeds of its own doom. Wanting to
beat the Russians to the moon provided the political and economic will to put
a huge effort into the Apollo program - but after that was achieved the
interest evaporated.

If you are more interested in the pissing contest than the science and
exploration, it isn't surprising that the latter gets short shrift in the long
run.

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wcummings
So... cheaper satellites? Thrilling.

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rkangel
Cheaper satellites is good don't underestimate it - that's not the point
though. This is cheaper anything to space, which means components of space
missions that are suddenly an order of magnitude cheaper than they were.

