
SpaceX Successfully Launches and Lands Second Reused Rocket - ramshanker
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/251473-spacex-successfully-launches-second-reused-rocket-delivers-first-bulgarian-payload
======
ncallaway
I love that the launch and subsequent landing of a reused first stage is so
unexciting that this article has no comments an hour in. It's truly impressive
how quickly SpaceX went from experimental landings to boring and routine
landings.

~~~
peeters
Well if we're searching for interest, a "first" for this one was that this was
the first rocket that has landed on two different oceans. The first launch was
from Vandenberg and landed in the Pacific. The second was from Cape Canaveral
and landed in the Atlantic.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
Anyword on the second stage? I know they're also working on getting those to
land as well.

~~~
tankenmate
It incredibly expensive, a satellite that could be lift by a Falcon 9 with a
first stage only recovery would have to be lifted by a Falcon Heavy if you
wanted to recover the second stage. Basically you'd need to almost double the
unfueled weight of the second stage with aerodynamic devices that can
withstand the re-entry plasma and the heat shield. And then add the extra
weight for the de-orbit and re-entry burns. You would probably more than halve
the payload capacity. Even at best is borders on not worth it.

[EDIT] fixed typo

~~~
hallmark
Not worth it - until the delta cost of fuel and maintenance on a FH is less
than the cost of dumping a Falcon 9 second stage into the ocean.

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robin_reala
[http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878334920141135872](http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878334920141135872)

> Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used almost all of the
> emergency crush core), but otherwise good

~~~
mabbo
If you rewatch the live stream, at 31:45 or so the rocket starts hitting the
atmosphere at 6500 km/h, or nearly 2 km/s. The grid fin, used to help steer
through the atmosphere is _burning_ , and then the video from that rocket cut
out.

At that point I simply presumed it was over for it, yet somehow it still
managed to land. They'll probably use it again. We live in a crazy, amazing
world.

~~~
the8472
> The grid fin, used to help steer through the atmosphere is burning

They're using ablative paint, so that's somewhat intended. It's needed because
the current fins are made of aluminium, they intend to replace them with
titanium ones in the future which will have improved reusability.

~~~
robin_reala
The future is here:
[http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878821062326198272](http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/878821062326198272)

> Flying with larger & significantly upgraded hypersonic grid fins. Single
> piece cast & cut titanium. Can take reentry heat with no shielding.

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milansuk
BTW next lift off is very very soon: Iridium NEXT - June 25th 20:24 UTC and
they will land on boat again(Just Read The Instructions)

~~~
vermontdevil
Then next one is July 1st - expendable though.

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ramshanker
1st Thought: This is making me believe that one day I would have my own
satelite.

2nd Thought: By that time, space would already be too junked. Better to use
public transport.

~~~
bobbington
I'd like to put up my own spy satellite. It would be nice to be able to look
instantly wherever I want. Probably some rich person will do it one day.

~~~
zeep
Don't you think that they already are doing that?

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foobarbecue
Amazing how close it is to the edge to the deck. Almost missed.

~~~
sunstone
If you watched live the video of the landing was very patchy. In fact there
was just one frame before the rocket landed and it showed the empty barge deck
but a huge depression in the surface of the ocean on the other side of the
barge and there was an instant and loud in take of breath by the SpaceX crowd.

It really didn't look good, either the rocket had gone into the ocean there or
the rocket somehow had hovered over that spot far from its expected landing
zone. The video stopped again for what seemed like a long time might have been
30 seconds the next single frame showed the rocket far off center on the barge
deck and there was a huge cheer from the SpaceX crew. It must have been a very
close call.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I too found that particular set of frames quite interesting. So the last
telemetry had stage 1 at 5700 km/sec and 22.3 km in altitude (so about 13
seconds from impact). The landing burn starts and at 24:55 "something" impacts
the water really hard next to the barge. The announcer calls "landing burn has
started" but you don't see any change in the telemetry (altitude or velocity)
so its safe to say the downlink is still not functioning at that point). Then
at 25:41 (about a minute later) we see the stage sitting on the drone ship. So
once again I'm really surprised they haven't figured done something to
stabilize video. Even it it were a 'drone dinghy' 500 yards off to the side
holding a steady lock on a satellite or an aerial drone.

The other interesting bit is at 23:42 where we see one of the grid fins in the
process of burning off the side of the rocket. Then we lose downlink video
from that point on with the stage. It is flying at nearly 4,000 mph at an
altitude of 87,000 feet. The SR-71 goes half that fast at that altitude and
experiences significant heating on its skin, since drag is proportional to the
square of the velocity you're taking 4x the heating.

It has to be a very fine line between burning these things up vs landing them.
And clearly the more 'abuse' they will tolerate during re-entry the more fuel
you can use toward lift mass. Still, I'm always surprised that they don't use
more rocket power to slow down while above 100,000' to avoid the high speed
re-entry and then use streamers or drogue chutes rather than RP1 to slow down
in the thicker atmosphere.

~~~
jaggederest
The reason they don't use chutes is that the stated long term goal is refuel
and refly from the pad with the BFS.

Chutes have to be repacked, means it's a no-go. Powered landing is where it's
at for true reusability.

~~~
agildehaus
Chutes also have almost zero utility for a vehicle the size of the ITS when
landing on Mars.

Every single thing they're doing in this program is prep for Mars.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
Not just SpaceX, everything Elon is doing is centered around mars. Yes some of
these are a stretch, a big stretch even. Ok a ludicrous stretch. Anyways by
company.

SpaceX-pushing rocket tech makes mars a more targetable endevour.

Tesla- better solar panels and better batteries mean you can consume and store
more power on be red planet.

Open AI- it's going to be very important to be able to prefab critical systems
before any astronauts get there. AI can help there.

Boring Company- Where do you build a home in a place with almost no atmosphere
to shield you from radiation? Underground. What's nice and cylindrical and
would fit nicely in a tube atop a rocket? Bore segments. Also TBC's bores are
being designed with a smaller diameter than your typical bore. Elon says it's
so cars can fit in them to revolutionize the LA commute, I see something that
can be moduralized and put on top of a heavy lift rocket and used to prefab
Martian living quarters.

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alphanumeric0
Serious question, and maybe this is more for r/askengineers, but why was so
much failure tolerated to successfully land a rocket upright? Is it feasible
to land a rocket on its side?

~~~
will_hughes
Take a soda can, glue a lead weight to the bottom. Now scale it up to 15
stories tall. You have roughly the design of the Falcon 9 first stage.

As mentioned, it's designed to take stress in one direction, when empty the
vast majority of the weight is in the engines, which will make it want to fall
bottom first anyway.

It's not designed as a lifting body, so doing things like attaching wings
would require additional reenforcement. For each 5KG you add for
landing/recovery equipment/structure, you take 1KG off the maximum payload

The upright landing, landing legs, and grid fins is the most efficient trade-
off they've been able to come up with so far.

------
Diederich
Moving toward the ideal: just another kind of 'air'craft.

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iharhajster
Nicely done, SpaceX. Keep going! And the rest of the space community. Baby
steps towards cheaper lifts, Mars and beyond. Exciting times.

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imron
The next exciting headline will be when the reused rockets start being reused
again.

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imron
Can't wait to see how this affects their prices and also the competition.

~~~
peeters
They've stated in the past that the reused rockets are offered at a 10%
discount, of a launch price of around 60 million. But that's expected to widen
considerably, for now there's basically no competition and they're still
ramping up production and launch capabilities (and are wanting to recoup their
investment).

~~~
sand500
Don't forget that customers get bumped used in the schedule by quite a bit by
agreeing to ride a re used rocket. The extra income from having a sat in space
early is much more valuable.

~~~
imron
At the moment people are wary of putting payload on a reused rocket. There
will soon come a tipping point of being wary of using a rocket that _hasn 't_
been flown before.

~~~
kuschku
But that will take a long time, even with new Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX is an
order of magnitude less reliable than Ariane, for now. At exactly the same
price.

Long term, the only viable competitors of SpaceX include Ariane and Blue
Origin.

~~~
nickik
Ariane is already not competitive at the moment, and the reliable is not that
different. Look at the insurance premium and its clear that the estimated
reliability is not that large. They have massively exhilarated Ariane 6
because they know they simply can not compete with the Ariane 5.

Also Ariane is only a viable competitor because they don't need to compete on
cost. If Arianespace had to finance the Ariane 6 by themselves they would not
be close to competing with SpaceX.

Blue Origin prices are unknown so far.

~~~
kuschku
For a small to medium size satellite, Ariane is actually currently 2 million
USD per launch cheaper than SpaceX.

Around 60 vs. 62 million.

And you get an order of magnitude better reliability.

This might change in the next years, but for now, it's not changing.

~~~
greglindahl
Interestingly enough, if you look at the Ariane manifest you can see that
they're having a hard time finding satellites to fly in the "lower berth".
Meanwhile, SpaceX's comsat launches are mostly heavier sats that won't fit
into the "lower berth".

~~~
kuschku
Yes, it’s especially interesting how basically all of the smaller satellite
launches have moved to the – at the moment – more expensive and less reliable
SpaceX, leaving Ariane without small satellites to launch.

~~~
greglindahl
You have it backwards. Most of SpaceX's commercial comsat launches are big
enough that Ariane would charge 90 million euros to launch.

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LeonM
It's a shame SpaceX never/rarely releases any of the onboard footage from the
droneship. I understand that the live connection cuts out when a rocket comes
down with it's engines on full thrust pointed right down at the ship, but
surely the cameras on the ship store the footage.

Since the landing was a particularly difficult and rough one, I'd love to see
HD footage of the rocket coming in and landing on the deck of the ship.

Edit: typo

~~~
danielsamuels
> It's a shame SpaceX never/rarely releases any of the onboard footage from
> the droneship

That's not true, usually a day or two after the landing Elon or SpaceX post
the footage to Instagram and then later to YouTube.

~~~
jpgvm
Not always, but I would say in cases like this when it's interesting (hot
landing) Elon normally does come through with the goods on Instagram/Twitter.

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purpleidea
"Seems that @SpaceX often suspiciously "looses" the live video feed of
landings until after success/internal review. [https://youtu.be/Y8mLi-
rRTh8?t=1520](https://youtu.be/Y8mLi-rRTh8?t=1520) "

[https://twitter.com/purpleidea/status/878473127600283648](https://twitter.com/purpleidea/status/878473127600283648)

~~~
gpm
Or you know... maintaining a high bandwidth satellite link on a barge in the
ocean with three rocket engines pounding down on it is difficult and not
particularly high priority. They have never not shared footage afterwards, and
we've got footage all the way down live once or twice (not with a three engine
landing burn mind you, since this is the first time they tried that).

The man in charge of this (/u/bencredible on reddit) has also explicitly
stated that it's not intentional.

~~~
marvin
It's always been the dodgiest landings that "accidentally" lose video coverage
for the longest. I don't believe this explanation, even if it's the official
account. No big criticism though; I'm super happy that they do the launch
webcasts. Super exciting to watch.

~~~
callmeal
>It's always been the dodgiest landings that "accidentally" lose video
coverage for the longest.

Maybe you haven't seen some of the earlier ones that had RUD. Take this[1] one
for instance from the SpaceX channel. Looks like they stopped using
helicopters to stream the landing. Makes sense, because once you have all the
kinks worked out, you no longer need redundant instrumentation.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0)

Edit: Adding a successful one[2]. See how the rocket comes in, pointing away
from the barge and then straightens up.

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYmQQn_ZSys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYmQQn_ZSys)

~~~
ygra
In those cases the helicopter recording is by NASA since those are CRS
flights. The commercial customers don't particularly care about the landing
(apart from cost reductions), or at least not _that_ much, and SpaceX
themselves only have the barge and support ships out on the ocean.

