This specifically illustrates why SpaceX's approach to rocketry is the right way to go. They lost a booster that already had many successful launches and they have 19 more already flight proven and 3 new ones being prepared. (Apologies for that ungainly sentence.)
It's definitely a loss, but not crippling in any way.
The booster does have a monetary value, they are estimated to cost ~ $50M. Not sure if flights make them less or more valuable. SpaceX likes to use wording with a positive connotation – "flight proven" instead of, say, "refurbished".
Of course, the new ones are better, so B1058 was outdated, which should lower its value.
I'd say flight proven is appropriate wording. Given the reliability they have demonstrated. As an analogy would you feel more comfortable on a plane's maiden flight or on flight 132?
Jon Edwards (VP of Falcon Launch Vehicles at SpaceX) said:
"We are planning to salvage the engines and do life leader inspections on the remaining hardware. There is still quite a bit of value in this booster. We will not let it go to waste."
It's literally the "SMART Reuse" (their name not mine) plan of the historical prime launch contractor in the US, United Launch Alliance (joint owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin). They plan to eject the engine section and parachute it down and then recover just the engines.
This was discussed in a twitter spat between Musk and ULA's CEO Tory Bruno a few years ago.
Back then the go-to excuse for why other companies weren't pursuing reuse was that it'd take 10 flights to break even in terms of making up for the lost payload capacity. They claimed that since they were only launching like 10 times a year, this would make it so they don't have to produce any boosters for years, screwing things up for the assembly line. Back then SpaceX was still not as firmly established in the industry, so this was them basically claiming to know better than the "new kids".
Musk countered by roughly explaining the reductions they have to take (iirc 15% payload lost for the landing fuel and 10% for the extra hardware) and explained that with their costs, they've made up for that by the 3rd launch.
Of course since then megaconstellations came about and other geopolitical situations caught all the other big launch providers off guard leaving F9 as basically the only ride available with any spare launch capacity (even with Vulcan and Ariane 6 not too far off, they're fully booked for quite a while). Proving that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Looking at the total volume and weight of payload carried up there by partially reusable Falcon vs. other launchers since reusable Falcon's debut, it certainly seems that customers prefer reusable Falcon.
No, but there are a lot of unknowns. You need to take the most critical pieces of the rocket and subject them to more forces and make them somehow detachable from the tanks.
John Kraus (who takes fantastic space launch pictures - @johnkrausphotos on Instagram) wrote a warm and appreciative obituary for the booster.
> Falcon 9 B1058
> A portion of the record-setting Falcon 9 booster remains on board the Just Read the Instructions droneship. After its 19th launch and landing, the vehicle tipped over in rough seas during the transit back to Port Canaveral, and its top portion broke off.
> On May 30, 2020, B1058 launched Demo-2, the mission that returned orbital human spaceflight to the United States after the retirement of the space shuttle. It went on to fly hundreds of Starlink satellites and other payloads into orbit over its roughly 3.5-year flight history. It brought back the iconic NASA worm logo, and in the time since became a notable and sentimental booster for much of the spaceflight community.
> While its loss is disappointing, it's worth remembering that it flew 18 more missions than every expendable rocket that's ever flown, and the lessons learned from B1058 will contribute to further learnings about Falcon 9 and its recovery and reflight operations. Its 19 flights contributed to an incredible track record of over 250+ orbital class rocket landings, unparalleled by any other entity in the industry.
> Hopefully some of what remains can be put on display!
It makes sense to try and accumulate "mileage" on one disproportionately more than on the others. That way, you could get learnings of long term issues (ideally) before the rest of the fleet is at risk to make necessary improvements.
There's a list of dead comments here helping you with your english. FYI (if you can't see them), your odd and incorrect use of "learnings" is being corrected to "lessons".
Yeah, what’s going on with those comments? One might argue whether “learnings” is incorrect or just stylistically bad; some dictionaries seem to list it. But why would anyone care enough to create half a dozen sock puppets to make this one point (none of them seem to have any other comments)? That seems completely insane to me.
"Learning" is also a noun [1] - which can be plural, so I'd say the creator of those comments has some learnings to make.
More generally, though, being a grammar nazi is silly. Dictionaries are defined by the common use of language and language is quite flexible, evolving, unique to individuals, and even used to be much more geographically continuous than it is today.[2]
2 - Here's my favorite talk on the subject given by Chomsky, highly recommend a listen (especially to the poster of those dead comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUbIlwHRkY
Kindof sad when you put it like this actually. I assumed it was a bot but I guess there's an HN captcha to prevent that? Well anyway I hope they're able to find some inner peace.
Nope, sorry. Same usage. Read until the end. It’s respectable to have a little humility in the face of contradictory evidence :)
> Languages tend to have more rules than that
This is a common misconception about language - to think that it has many strict rules. It’s a frankly elitist take and Chomsky, the most prominent contemporary linguist, disagrees. See my other comment for a talk by Chomsky to develop a better understanding of language
This subthread has nothing to do with the original comment. It seems to be an argument that we should use words as we damn well please instead of having a common standard that would allow us to understand each other.
> an argument that we should use words as we damn well please instead of having a common standard that would allow us to understand each other
Bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?
Every single person has a language that’s unique to them, and there’s a tremendous amount of both redundancy and context, cultural and situational, that need to exist to convey meaning.
Obviously increasing deviation from the “standard” lexicon or “laws” of universal grammar would at some point fail to convey any meaning whatsoever, but given the context of this discussion, we’re not discussing egregious violations - merely creative and valid use of existing words which, if you read the other comments, is already standard in industry.
My role frequently requires me to explain nuanced technical details to less technical folks or those with differing technical expertise. Even in the same building, between native English speaking coworkers using language in a fully “standard” way, when sharing ideas, there needs to be a back and forth discussion to reduce ambiguity and converge into a commonly held mental abstraction for whatever it is being discussed.
Don’t believe me? Why do you think legalese exists? Legalese should be the culmination of precision in conveying meaning, but even with legalese, it’s up to the value systems and judgements of courts and judges to interpret the law.
Language is complicated. Try not to be too uptight about it. Have a beer. Relax.
That's just you changing the topic and flamebaiting into arguing about grammar.
The matter is that OP hasn't made any great mistake (or any mistake, I believe) by saying 'learnings'. It was unnecessary and off topic to correct them. This should have ended there.
Who decides what's proper English? Non-native speakers? This is a word I've heard almost every day at multiple companies, definitely seems to be on its way to proper English if it isn't already.
The completely serious answer is there are multiple approaches.
The young American nation fell in lockstep with the Webster approach of a prescriptive dictionary whereby a self appointed gatekeeper decided for others what was and was not correct English.
They further pursued this path by embracing the doctrines of Strunk & White in The Elements of Style.
Meanwhile, back in the cradle of the English hodgepodge the multi-volume wall lining known as The Oxford English Dictionary took a descriptive path that described English as she is wrote.
"Proper English" is a car crash caused by a train wreck of Romance and other languages uttered by survivors wandering about a global incident site.
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language."
Yes, actually. But we aren't resting on our (very profitable) laurels. Development of Falcon slowed so attention could pivot to the new generation of even more reusable vehicles. Development on Merlin started around 2005, the first F9 was built in 2010, and first landing was in 2015. Raptor engine testing began around that time, and starship hopped in 2020. These things take time, but in truth we're right on schedule.
It's the equivalent of a taxiing accident at an airport while going to a maintenance hanger. Not really the failure mode most care about, especially not for a retired vehicle.
During WW2, the aircraft engine makers needed to make the engines more reliable. They'd put them on a test stand, and run them at full power until they broke. They'd investigate what broke, improve it, and run the engine until the next thing broke. Etc.
That's how to make things reliable.
19 cycles isn't a lot for reliability testing. I'm not a test engineer, but it'll likely take hundreds of launches to get them really solid.
Do you think you could work out all the kinks faster?
They've single-handedly changed how rocketry works. They're the only ones doing anything about this. Give them some time, for goodness sake! I think they've more than demonstrated their capability.
They're getting 18 launches out of these things. The previous record was 0 - 1 launches. It's an astonishing improvement, and they're getting better and better.
> Judging them against the competition seems fair but that's not the goal post they set for themselves.
Honest question, why does it seem fair to judge them against the goal they set for themselves rather than what they've achieved? To take the reverse example it means you should judge people really highly when they set really simple goals and then exceed the very simple goal. That doesn't seem very reasonable.
And to be clear, that goal you're talking about is the goal of SpaceX overall, not Falcon 9 specifically. The goal for Falcon 9 this year was 100 launches. They're on track to reach 96 or 97 this year, they're at 94 so far. I don't remember any plans to give Falcon 9 airline operations, unless you go back really far (around a decade ago) when there was still plans for Falcon 9 upper stage reusability.
Making rockets as reusable as airplanes necessitates many millions of flights per year, not a few hundreds. It will take a lot of time to build up enough demand. There has to be some pipeline of production which to be economical, needs to be constantly loaded, so at least a few dozen new rockets per year (airplane producers who build that little are normally balancing on the brink, it takes hundreds per year for true economy of scale). And then they need to fly thousands or at least many hundreds of times per year, each, over decades, so at least 10K times each, typically 30K or sometimes even 50K times. No less than a million total sorties per year PER PRODUCER, because an industry with just one supplier is never going to be efficient. So several million flights and maybe 50-100M tons delivered to LEO, per year, total.
It's hard to see what does the humankind may need to put into orbit in quantities like that. Just for comparison, this is about as much as air cargo volumes delivered in the world.
The Moon has energy, raw materials, and a shallow gravity well. Hence it would be valuable for constructing and launching large spacecraft. The spacecraft would also not need to be built to withstand the stresses of an Earth launch, nor would it need to deal with weather, moisture, etc.
It’s also important to note that the landing caused uneven crushing of the landing legs. The result being that the booster has a lean to it and they were unable to fully secure it with the octograbber. The leaning of the booster plus wind and rough seas was required to cause the failure. If the booster was level and fully secured it should have been fine.
The newer boosters have self levelling legs which remove the lean caused by uneven crushing of the landing leg cores.
When I did my one and only parachute jump, they cautioned us hard to jam our legs together for the landing, as any sideways movement would put all the load on one leg, which would break.
Sure enough, one of my friends I went with landed with his legs apart, despite the instructor yelling at him from the ground. He shattered the leg he landed on. (Parachutes weren't as gentle in those days.)
I expect it would be the same problem with the rocket. Any movement sideways when landing means the force is going to be on one leg. I wonder how they deal with that.
You can see that sometimes in the landing footage, the legs are pretty flexible, and they get some help from RCS thrusters at the top of the booster. Plus, as soon as the engine has purged any excess lox/fuel, a robot slides underneath and tries to latch onto several points, which probably helps by bringing the center of mass down.
There's footage online of some of the early landings when the robot had not been implemented, where boosters slid across the barge in part due to landing at a bad angle.
It’s important to note this happened 2 days after the launch. They probably have to be somewhat liberal with what forecasted conditions are allowed during the return trip given the added uncertainty for that time span. Otherwise, they’d be having to scrub launches much more often. Pour one out for B1058 and move on, I think.
The newer boosters with auto-leveling legs would've been able to survive, and even this booster was still chained down wherever octograbber failed to secure.
So it seems like they expected the risk of loss of the booster to be low, it just so happened that this time things went wrong.
They have previously delayed launches due to poor weather at the barge. So if that was the case this time, they would've just postponed, unless I guess they weren't really worried about losing a life leader booster that was apparently too old to be worth retrofitting with autoleveling legs.
They definitely do sometimes delay launches due to bad weather in the landing zone. This could have been a miscalculation, bad forecast, a mistake securing the booster, or just bad luck.
Isn't it crazy that almost all of their competitors dump the whole first stage in the ocean every launch?
Weather at the launch site was probably quite different. I don't know the exact distance, but I assume the landing barges are a good distance downrange.
Falcon 9 is already somewhat sensitive to launch weather conditions, given that it is very long and thin (pencil-like). Scrubs because of inclement weather are not unusual, in contrast to, say, Russian Soyuz, which can take about everything that the Kazakh steppe can throw at it.
If you need to optimize for both the launch weather and the landing site weather, your launch windows are even more limited. At the end of the day, losing an occassional booster isn't a reputational problem; losing the payload would be.
"actually inventing a rocket" and "handing billions of dollars to a swarm of engineers and thier managers, and actually getting a rocket back instead of having the shirt scammed off your back" are different skills. The latter is valuable because it's rare: ESA, Jeff Bezos, the US Senate, Richard Branson (oooooh richard branson), ULA, etc all tangibly lack it.
People seem to forget that the joke at the time was "How do you become a millionaire quickly? Be a billionaire founding an aerospace company". You weren't going to get much investor funding for a space company and there were no processes in place at NASA to fairly handle integrating newcomers into the market.
Musk betting his fortune on SpaceX and sticking it through even when they were close to bankruptcy was what ultimately blew the doors open for all the other new space companies and the increasing private investment in space technologies.
Don't move the goal posts. This is a thread about whether Musk is a rocket inventor. The US President once tasked a group of Engineers to build a rocket. The US President didn't invent the rocket.
It's definitely a loss, but not crippling in any way.