
SpaceX SES-9 Mission Live Webcast - nerdy
http://www.spacex.com/webcast
======
generj
Elon confirms 1st stage did not get a good landing

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/705917924972736512](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/705917924972736512)

Edit - text of tweet: "Rocket landed hard on the droneship. Didn't expect this
one to work (v hot reentry), but next flight has a good chance."

Very impressive nonetheless. I am wondering if they had a loss of the drone
ship?

~~~
mikeash
It's unlikely the drone ship would be lost. The rocket is coming in nearly
empty. The explosions we've seen in the past are really just the remnants of
fuel briefly burning, it's not all that powerful. The rocket itself is light
compared to the ship. It's a little bit like someone throwing a soda can at
your head. It'll hurt, but it won't break your skull. Some of the support
equipment on the deck might take damage (there are fun pictures of the ship
after previous attempts with various items dented and scorched) but the ship
itself should be fine.

~~~
generj
Ah, OK. For some reason I had the mental image of a bunch of inexpensive ships
which would surely sink if they got hit at high velocity. It's pretty
incredible, given how large the rockets are, that the ship dwarfs them, but
recalling earlier landing videos you are correct.

~~~
mikeash
Just to put some numbers on it, this barge is the MARMAC 304, modified by
SpaceX. According to this page:

[http://www.mcdonoughmarine.com/recent-
news.html](http://www.mcdonoughmarine.com/recent-news.html)

That ship has a cargo capacity of over 13,000 tons. I believe an empty Falcon
9 first stage is around 20 tons. Totally different scales.

~~~
ape4
I read that entire barge blog. Its interesting.

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toufka
Rainbow-bars [NO SIGNAL] right when stage 1 was landing on the barge...

So suspenseful!

The last frame before video cut out
[http://i.imgur.com/3HCnn7c.png](http://i.imgur.com/3HCnn7c.png)

Edit - looks like stage 1 did _not_ survive landing (this time).

[https://twitter.com/MatthewBTravis/status/705908015711518720](https://twitter.com/MatthewBTravis/status/705908015711518720)

The Drone Ship says, "Sorry guys :("
[https://twitter.com/TheDroneShip/status/705907706209693696](https://twitter.com/TheDroneShip/status/705907706209693696)

~~~
dtparr
Yeah, at least this time we expected that to happen. (SpaceX webcast guy
indicated the rocket shakes the uplink dish so hard on approach it's likely to
lose signal every time).

~~~
daeken
I do wonder why they don't have a separate small barge with a couple fiber
runs between them, to do the comms (e.g. host the dish(es)). I guess it just
isn't that important.

~~~
dtparr
That was asked on the spacex sub-reddit. The response was something like "you
underestimate the power of a Merlin" which I took to mean that a reasonable
distance to avoid the effects is too far to reasonably run ship-to-ship
cabling.

~~~
daeken
That's totally reasonable, too. I had assumed that the wash from the rocket
would be largely straight down, but that's probably way wrong.

~~~
igjeff
It is probably pretty much straight down...until it impacts the flat surface
of the ship.

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nerdy
They're aiming for 6:35 ET, from the page:

We’re targeting today, Friday, March 4 at 6:35pm ET for launch of SES-9. The
window extends to 8:06pm ET. The SpaceX webcast is scheduled to go live here
(on [http://www.spacex.com/webcast](http://www.spacex.com/webcast)) and on
YouTube about 10 minutes prior to launch. For rocket views, launch countdown
audio and telemetry info, use this link for our technical webcast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIkPP2LM8DU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIkPP2LM8DU)

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catilac
Did I see video footage of inside the fuel tank?

~~~
dasmoth
Pretty sure it was actually the LOX tank. But yes.

~~~
catilac
Ahh, thanks for clarifying!

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Animats
Another successful Falcon 9 launch. Too bad about the booster landing. The
barge landing is very tough; it requires drastic maneuvers in the last seconds
to hit that tiny target. The land-based landing pad is much larger.

The Falcon Heavy launch was supposed to be next month, but that's slipped to
late 2016, maybe.

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gozur88
Nice "intermission" music.

I'm glad the launch is going well. After all those false starts a first stage
failure would have been depressing.

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ajtaylor
The only question that matters right now is: did stage 1 land successfully on
the barge???

~~~
gozur88
Unless you're SES, in which case the remaining 2nd stage stuff is pretty
important.

~~~
melling
After all that's what they're getting paid for. They can crash a dozen more
stage 1's and they're still making money. If only other startups worked that
way.

~~~
trothamel
At over 13 years old, SpaceX is many things - but I don't think it can really
be called a startup anymore.

~~~
manquer
This gets mentioned lot, not just with spaceX but other similar sized
organizations as well . It is simply not true, for two reasons

a) The scales are not the same in aerospace as in software, they are still
very much the minnows in that industry.

b) It does not matter if they have 5,000 staff or $1+ Billion revenue
today,What matters is the high growth plan they are following, In the next
10-15 years they could be easily doing $100 Billion + i.e. if they are
successful with cost costing and can expand the market for it support
companies of that size.

Any company looking to 100x or more their revenue is a startup. Size
notwithstanding, simply because whatever they do now will be nothing similar
to what they need to do to get the remaining 99%. Every single business and
technology process would have to be continuously innovated and thrown out to
get there. That really requires a startup mind frame and startup culture

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melling
Supersonic...

