
SpaceX sticks 11th rocket landing after launching first used Dragon capsule - smb06
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/3/15725720/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-landing-success-nasa-used-dragon
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Pharylon
Sometimes I think I'm smart because I can (mostly) get Webpack to work the way
I want.

Then I watch a SpaceX livestream and realize, eh, not so much. ;)

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StavrosK
To be fair, SpaceX's roadmap is:

1\. Land rocket.

2\. Reuse rocket.

3\. Colonize Mars.

4\. Get Webpack to work the way we want.

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agumonkey
low hanging fruits.. Musk is defintely lazy

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friedman23
It's already become routine, soon people will expect rockets to be reusable.
If they keep up the launches every two weeks and begin even accelerating the
pace of launches I do not see how any rocket company will be able to compete
for business.

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sillysaurus3
I was just thinking that hey, here we are where a SpaceX landing has only 46
points in 2 hours. It's really cool to see it become routine.

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monk_e_boy
There is a tiny part of me that is starting to think Yay! Are we becoming a
spacefaring civilization? We are tentatively close.

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sillysaurus3
The real test is what happens after a ship explodes. Musk himself has said
that you can't really improve the reliability that much. Cost is the only
vector, and SpaceX is making spaceflight cheap.

It's still risky. If it's true that reliability hasn't changed at all, then
it's even more likely that we're going to see a string of failures rather than
a single isolated incident. That will be the true test: can we take that in
stride, or will others get the last word?

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mikeash
I expect reuse to result in much better reliability in the long term. The
engineers will have a much better picture of which components fail and in what
way if they can look at flown examples.

So far, SpaceX's reliability is not great, but they keep going.

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cpitman
That Space Shuttle was reusable, and it still had catastrophic failures.

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valuearb
The Space Shuttle was incredibly unsafe design, and it evolved fairly little
during it's life. Mixing unthrottable and unstoppable solid rockets with
liquid rockets was never a good idea. The massive external fuel tank was
vulnerable. The tile system was an achilles heel, and extending the wingspan
to force air force payloads on the shuttle made reentry even more dangerous.
Finally carrying a huge space plane every flight eliminated more than 80% of
its payload capacity.

Falcon 9s and Dragons are an evolution of tried and true rocket engineering
principles, even capsules are much safer at reentry than the shuttle. Delta
showed that type can be launched with a high degree of safety. SpaceX has the
advantage of getting returned equipment back from space to learn from and
improve.

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sillysaurus3
Completely agreed, but let's be honest: we're going to see SpaceX shuttles
explode, and people will probably die. I hope not, but the things you're
saying now are exactly the same kinds of things people were saying the last
time space travel was fashionable. It's just incredibly risky to try to ride
an explosion into space, no matter how you do it.

Going forward, it might be to our advantage to own it rather than hide it.
Yeah, it's dangerous. So let's risk the danger! We courageously do our best
and launch ourselves into orbit, and some of us die, but progress marches
forward.

I'm not sure if that type of message would have a better or worse impact than
shielding everyone from the idea that disaster will strike till it happens. It
could go either way.

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jfoutz
Well, yeah. But they'll surely beat that 1.5% failure rate of the sts. They're
at a 3% total failure rate right now, but they'll have (I hope) a long run of
success, maybe hundreds, before they put people on the falcon.

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cfreeman
There's not going to be hundreds. The first crew flight is supposed to happen
next year.

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Kenji
The speed at which they develop, implement and successfully use this
technology is mind-boggling. Congratulations to everyone involved with this.

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YZF
Wow. Does anyone know what sort of control they have during the final burn? Do
they modulate it in closed loop to track the landing profile or is the control
via some other actuators? It just blows your mind that you can get this sort
of accuracy with these speeds/distance/time. I also wonder how they get real-
time accurate positioning. GPS?

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dasmoth
It's mostly GPS and inertial navigation. Probably integrated together with
some kind of Kalman filter.

The very last few seconds add in data from a radar altimeter. Per the post-
launch press conference, this time they added some special paint to the
landing pad to give a better radar return. I imagine the steel deck of the
ASDS already gives a pretty good radar return.

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eps
Can someone explain why the "Stage 1 speed" at the top right on the technical
broadcast stream jumps from 6,000 km/h to 24,000 km/h right after the
separation?

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFoOqqSIYpw](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFoOqqSIYpw)
around 22:28 mark

In fact, the speed settles at 18,000 km/h after the landing.

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mrep
that was a bug

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tobych
That headline makes no sense to me. What does "sticks" mean here?

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beisner
It's a turn of phrase borrowed from judged sports with a jumping/dismount
component, especially gymnastics. If a gymnast dismounts from a balance beam
and lands without stumbling or bending the knees too much, one would say he
has "stuck the landing". In the headline, OP is saying that, by virtue of the
landing being near-flawless, SpaceX "stuck" the landing. This is used quite
commonly in aviation/aerospace, but colloquially.

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marze
If they can find customers for the recovered stages at 80% of normal price, it
will be like printing money. Wow.

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jwanga
Whats interesting is that even if they command 100% of the launch market, The
launch market is currently less than 6% of the roughly $200B USD global space
industry. That is probably still not enough to fund a Mars colony fleet.

As it happens, most of the profits in space are in communication satellites,
which is why SpaceX is attempting to launch its own LEO constellation.

Some have speculated that if SpaceX can't launch their satellite constellation
then they will have bet the farm and lost. However, I think people
underestimate what may happen to demand when the cost of access to space drops
to dollars/kg from tens of thousands of dollars/kg.

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marktangotango
I believe this sentiment is spot on. Musks myopic focus on Mars has always
been puzzling to me. There are vast fortunes to be made in many areas, the
easiest, most immediate in my view is orbital tourism to inflatable habitat
destinations. Current falcon, not even heavy is sufficient, lift here.

Also, when dream chaser becomes operational, there will be a strong sense of
REAL progress.

Edit to clarify, I'm referring to the drastic cost reduction reusability gives
to reaching orbit, as the parent of this post says. I am saying there are a
lot of other desirable, profitable ventures, other than settling Mars, that
cheap access to space makes achievable.

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mikeash
He's not doing Mars for the money, he's doing it because he thinks it's
important and nobody else is pushing it hard enough.

If he was in it for the money he never would have started a rocket company.

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Zren
> Elon Musk: "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in
> the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the
> punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the
> fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me,
> like, "Is he serious?"

[https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_sp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity/transcript?language=en)

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vidarh
That's presumably a variation on the airline joke of the same form. I've heard
it about Richard Branson, but don't know if that is the original source.

The claim is that Richard Branson wa asked how to become a millionaire after
he'd start Virgin Atlantic, and answered "you become a billionaire and start
an airline".

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mikeash
The general form dates back to at least 1984:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=0pJVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22make+a+s...](https://books.google.com/books?id=0pJVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22make+a+small+fortune%22&dq=%22make+a+small+fortune%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUzZqG6qTUAhXHPCYKHR8CAI04UBDoAQhUMAk)

The way it's put there, it sounds like it had already been around a while.
It's possible Branson was the first person to apply it to airlines. I see a
lot of people attributing it to Robert Crandall, former CEO of American
Airlines, but can't find anything actually quoting him on it. He did say, "A
lot of people came into the airline business. Most of them promptly exited,
minus their money," which is pretty similar in spirit.

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WestCoastJustin
You can watch the recorded live stream landing at
[https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=37m19s](https://youtu.be/PFoOqqSIYpw?t=37m19s)

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725686
What happened with the cheering? It's like watching a comedy without the
recorded laughter.

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positr0n
As the description notes, that is the technical stream. Here's the stream with
commentary (and cheering :) )

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URh-
oPqjlM8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URh-oPqjlM8)

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ge96
Does it start firing the rockets on descent not so much to slow down but as a
shield for reentry? I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe the rocket isn't
high enough to burn up on re-entry? I'm not sure it's not exactly coated in
heat-resistant ("cliche-black-colored") tiles.

To me maybe when you fire a plume of exhaust like that it forms a shield
around the rocket... not sure.

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djaychela
I think that the 1st stage separates at ~6000kmh; that's nowhere near the
speed of orbit - which is around 28000kmh. I think that explains the ability
of the first stage to pass through the atmosphere without a heat shield - it's
not the high up, more the speed, I think.

From (again, not definitive) knowledge, the rocket fires to slow down
(boostback), a re-entry burn, then a landing burn. Indeed, there's info from
the horse's mouth here:

[http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-
ro...](http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-rockets)

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ge96
horse's mouth haha

thanks

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woodandsteel
I wonder if SpaceX will throw a big party after their 100th booster Earth
landing.

