
SpaceX Rocket Survives Experimental High-Thrust Landing at Sea - shahocean
https://www.space.com/39562-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-experimental-ocean-landing.html
======
ChuckMcM
Well that answers the question of why they were following the first stage and
why it seemed like it still had its legs (you can see one sticking up in the
tweeted photo).

Since I have to guess, I'm guessing it stayed closed up most of the way down,
avoiding perhaps even grid fin erosion during high re-entry speeds. It is fun
to see a company that has rockets it can expend for experiments like this
because it is so far ahead of its nearest launch competitor in terms of costs.

~~~
greenhouse_gas
They're not expanding it for experiments. It's just an old model that costs
too much to refurbish, and they've got a new one coming up which will be a lot
cheaper and easier to refurbish than the current (which is one model ahead of
the just-launched rocket).

And once you're throwing it out, might as well do some experiments.

~~~
jsolson
> And once you're throwing it out, might as well do some experiments.

I understand what you're saying here, but the extent to which the aerospace
industry just does not work this way is staggering.

This is a fairly unique quality of SpaceX.

~~~
mmjaa
.. not to mention the fact that "once you're throwing it out, might as well do
some experiments" is _not_ how the incumbent space companies was operating,
before SpaceX came along. For them, it was more like "we've got a near-
infinite supply of cash from the government, lets just submit another PO for
the next round of experiments" ..

------
remarkEon
So what was the purpose of this experiment? Will SpaceX now attempt to recover
boosters from flights to more extreme orbits?

~~~
rplnt
They did the landing burn with three engines instead of usual one. It's more
fuel efficient (shorter), which allows for either higher orbits or bigger
payloads.

I think it did it over water because they were afraid it would damage the
barge.

~~~
apearson
I believe the barge is also tied up with the falcon heavy launch next week.

~~~
njarboe
I think this is more likely the main reason for the water landing. They have
done a least one short three engine burn before using the drone ship.

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baq
that's the first rocket in history that was recovered but it wasn't planned
to.

~~~
dotancohen
Being billed in the media as a failure:

"SpaceX Expendable Rocket Fails" [https://perens.com/2018/02/01/spacex-
expendible-rocket-fails...](https://perens.com/2018/02/01/spacex-expendible-
rocket-fails/)

cbrf ynj vf tbvat gb uvg zr

~~~
simonh
It's a joke on a guy's blog. The rocket "failed to be expended".

~~~
dotancohen
Decode the ROT13 at the bottom of your parent post.

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imron
> Today's launch marked the sixth time that SpaceX has lofted a spacecraft
> using a pre-flown booster.

Well done SpaceX!

------
Animats
Falcon Heavy launch now scheduled for next Tuesday.

~~~
jlgaddis
I can't wait. I am so tempted to go watch it in person.

~~~
mmjaa
I'm on the other side of the world and even I want to go watch Falcon Heavy
launch live ..

------
throwaway1748
I guess the big question is how badly is the booster damaged by being in salt
water?

~~~
simonh
Pretty badly, apparently. They did look into parachuting them into the sea and
recovering them that way, before going to propulsive landing, but the salt
water damage is just too much to deal with.

~~~
kungito
Could they land it in some huge lake?

~~~
lorenzhs
Why would they prefer a lake to solid ground? If there was a fuel budget for
return to launch site, they’d do that before flying it into a lake. Hell,
they’d land it on a patch of grass before dumping it in water. There’s nothing
to be gained by making the rocket wet (or a lake all rocket-y, those things
are dirty with soot and stuff). They just weren’t sure that it wouldn’t punch
a big fat hole in the ship (plus the ship is needed for Falcon Heavy next
week), so they’d rather have the rocket get all seawatery than the ship
hole-y. As long as the telemetry comes back, who needs an old rocket? Might
still learn something from retrieving it but it’s not worth reflying as this
booster was an older version that is rather expensive to refurbish.

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Yetanfou
I wondered why my somewhat oldish but still quite usable Thinkpad T42p was
stuttering when opening the linked space.com article so I had a look at what
it tried to load. Here is the list of domains it loads stuff from followed by
the number of requests it makes for different types of resources.

All this for a page which should realistically have been a few KB of HTML,
some CSS and a few images. Read and weep:

    
    
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robin_reala
That’s atrocious, but unfortunately that’s the modern publishing web. I used
to be anti ad-blocker, but that was with a somewhat rosy view of advertising
networks as not being malicious privacy destroying entities. These days I just
block third-party trackers and be done with it.

