"That core booster approached the platform as planned, but it unfortunately hit the water going 300 MPH and was lost, because some of its return engines failed to light"
I think he said in the press conference that they weren't planning to reuse the core or boosters. (But then mentioned later they wanted some of the parts? IDK)
SpaceX has been keeping their launch prices pretty consistent, even when they couldn't know how many F9 stages they would actually recover. I think they've factored in testing losses into the price.
The damage to the ASDS might be more of a problem. Depending on how badly it was damaged, it might not be available to catch other cores that could have landed otherwise
The rocket ran out of engine igniter fluid. It had enough to light the centre engine, but not the two side engines.
That seems to imply they were trying to do a 3-engine landing, which they tested recently in the 'failed to expend the rocket' incident. This might explain why they miscalculated the igniter requirement since they don't have much experience with 3-engine landings.
Was it just lucky that the core didn’t directly impact the drone ship or was it designed to aim to the side in the event of the landing speed being too high?
It always comes in slightly to the side of the barge and as part of the landing burn it does a final sideways correction. I believe it was for this kind of situation - or one where the final burn doesn't even happen.
> But the core, middle booster, which attempted to land aboard “Of Course I Still Love You,” a drone barge that SpaceX uses as a mobile, ocean-borne landing pad stationed in the Atlantic for its flights departing from Florida, wasn’t recovered.
“Of Course I Still Love You” is the name of a spacecraft in The Culture, a series of novels that inspired Elon Musk when he was young.
I get a headache watching Star Wars like sci-fi where everything is manually controlled by the pilot. How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
I am pretty sure at some point in history, launching two rockets at the same moment must have been a big achievement. And now you have two rockets (in some sense boosters are rockets) landing back at the same time.
It was almost a brain stack-overflow for me. I made a weird, bleating laugh noise and tried to open my eyes wider than design spec. A sincerely surprising and amazing sight.
They were the same. Don't know if they did this intentionally. I actually watched them for two minutes for that, and was 99% sure they're the same image, just translated a bit. The final confirmation came near the end, when the other booster entered the view, and you could see for sure, both rectangles streamed from the same camera.
In the past few years we've gone from not even having a reusable launch vehicle to synchronized spaceships as performance art. (Oh and sending a car to Mars for fun.) What a time to be alive.
I guess they'd have to make the center rocket stronger to handle the added force of more rockets. Also, there may be diminishing returns when it comes to adding more boosters, and at some point it makes more sense to just redesign the rocket to be bigger (hence the BFR, which is the planned successor to Falcon Heavy).
I remember watching the artists impression animation video of how the the falcon heavy launch and landing would proceed, and when it showed both boosters landing at the same time I thought "heh, I wonder if they'll be able to pull that off in real life", and they did! Almost identical with the animation.
Even when we know that each one is fully automatic, and really (after staging) the booster return is just two instances of $booster, it's still absolutely magnificent.
It was awesome. The synchronized landing of both boosters was emotional.
Might be a naive thought, but for a few minutes, you forget everything else. There were millions of people from every nation live-watching the broadcast and everyone was cheering and hoping for the best.
The world seemed at peace during that moment and this is what I love about space exploration and all these great human achievements.
There was a comment thread on reddit where people were checking in with "GO" from all around the world before the launch. Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Eastern Europe, South America. This is humanity united under a common cause that's greater than us. How anyone can say space exploration doesn't have tangible benefits for humans after witnessing today's events is a complete mystery.
Watching the car orbit and the Earth's reflections in the windshield and paint and Starman's visor is sublime (sometimes goes to cameras of the engine/orbit overview)
I've had the same running all day, to be honest. Having the 2001 a Space Odyssey soundtrack and Interstellar's soundtrack in the background is quite pleasant.
The main argument for Falcon Heavy over Ariane 5 is cost, not reliability. Ariane 5 remains the most reliable heavy launcher, so that's the launcher you want for JWST.
That was like watching a sci fi film when the two cores landed.... I watched it with my mother (who is 80!), and she said it was as significant as the moon landing.
I might be reading into something that's not there, but the presenters (I didn't get their names) acted like they received surprising news in thier monitors at 39:03[1] just as they were about to report on the drone ship landing.
Dude: "We've just gotten confirmation..."
Lady: "oh!"
Dude: "Oh"
Lady: "[laughs] We are waiting to hear what happens..."
I think it was the right move, even if they knew then the main core had blown, it is too easy for the naysayers to make that the story. Taking away from the real and powerful narrative SpaceX must tell. That for the first time since the Saturn V we have a rocket powerful enough in active service to take us to the Moon/Mars, at a 1/3 of the price of the next heaviest lifter.
I felt like they were trying to redirect people to the main site for more information. I think the presenters were instructed not to give people more news so they could gain more traffic to their site. Seems like a smart way to gain more interest.
in the background you can see the feed from the drone ship - they see that it comes back on and the smoke is clearing but there's no rocket. They were a bit surprised. :)
... and then back to the presenters. As someone said to me, "That's their lying face!" :)
Can't fault them for wanting to dwell on the positives though, was an amazing moment to watch.
Edit: You can switch cameras on the above youtube video to the countdown net; you can clearly hear them saying "We lost the centre core" at 38m30s - not sure if that means "lost signal of" or otherwise. The people in the control room appear to become more muted at that point, though they still seem composed. It's really not clear.
Can't fault them for sure, but it's strange for them. SpaceX tends to be very upfront with their failures, and tends to broadcast and in many cases re-upload video of their failures.
Doubly so when the "failure" isn't part of the primary mission.
The feed quality drops in a way that makes the shaking antennae explanation seem plausible. I doubt the announcers knew then (why not just say so unless there was some ambiguity?), but it must have been a distinct concern, hence their 'smile nervously' reaction.
It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.
I noticed on the top right screen when landing the 2 outside boosters that they did a 3 engine landing burn. Previously they'd only done this over the water, but considering that the last one went well on 31 Jan, perhaps they also tried a 3 engine landing burn over the drone ship this time and something went wrong.
Although there hasn't been an official statement by SpaceX yet, and whoever said "we lost the center core" could have just been referring to the video feed from the drone ship.
It’s a command center of a complicated operation, nobody cares if someone has a camera issue on a side goal, it’s all about situation. I vote the booster was lost, and it was not worth using more bandwidth on it.
The quote from the video is: "We lost the center core."
For those like me unfamiliar with the terminology used in this context, is this wording reserved for situations where the rocket is destroyed or could it also mean they lost contact/video feed with the center core?
Where i live it was 21:45 and i couldn't help but told my son that was on bed to come and see it, cause IMHO it's a significant moment for space exploration. He went to bed later than usual but has a nice story to tell tomorrow at school.
Considered the same with my 4yo, but she was fast asleep since hours before. I'll be sure to show her tomorrow though! Not every day you see someone launch an astronaut in a car into space, then land two boosters next to eachother.
We already dig other nice videos on youtube with rocket launches and the like. "How it's made" and so on. Some manufacturing videos have, believe it or not, caught her attention for half an hour! I think it was especially a video from manufacturing the Mini (car), lots of robots and automation.
I'll bet it blew up on the droneship. It was weird they didn't have an immediate confirmation; I thought they have a boat or heli within visual range for the photo.
I'm just an amateur following along, but this seems likely to be one of the most important launches in modern rocketry history. This sets the stage for deep-space missions with reusable launch materials, which can greatly reduce the cost of future space exploration. Absolutely incredible achievement by the SpaceX team.
This definitely feels incredibly significant. The Soviet Union tried and failed 4 or 5 times to launch a rocket with this many engines, but now we're able to nail it on the first try aaaand land the boosters.
Well, but to be fair to the Soviets, they had to do it with really "stone age" electronics and technology and not knowing the many things we know today.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX was able to achieve what they did today also because they studied the Soviet N1 rocket and learned from what the engineers at that time had to figure out from scratch.
The other thing is that the N1 Moon rocket was a very different design - a single booster with many small engines, so incredibly difficult system to control, especially given the state of technology 50 years ago. Falcon Heavy is more similar to the successful Energia booster - core + strap on boosters - that was originally designed for the Russian shuttle. Or the Angara series.
It's definitely another inflection point. The Falcon 9 is 75% reusable by cost of components, the Falcon Heavy is 90% reusable. And it's capable of much, much more. That might open up the heavy lift launch market to a whole new gaggle of players and begin really expanding out what is done there. It'll certainly put a lot more missions on the table that weren't there before, like low cost outer planets space science probes.
Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
> Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
I'm pretty sure one can launch space station modules on regular Falcon-9 as well. Russians launch some on Soyuz rocket.
Love that SpaceX’s own team shoots, announces, and switches the live production in-house rather than hiring a production company.
Also love seeing machinists side by side cheering with software engineers, standing by a mission control which is placed feet from where engines are assembled on the shop floor.
It’s like that at BlueOrigin too. I visited twice (they gave me a job offer but withdrew it after I got badmouthed by a reference, gah). They have an avionics software engineering room right next to where they assemble the engines.
The 4 presenters were also engineers. And by doing it that way, they got to show that some engineers are black women. Let's hope this inspires a generation of black girls to seek a career in space or tech.
This is why I love the live streams hosted by John Innsprucker. He doesn't look like a TV star, he looks like an engineer, a rocket scientist. He looks real.
The other hosts are great, but if you told me they were hired actors or PR people I'd believe it.
Seeing how a harmless comment on a man 'look[ing] like an engineer, a rocket scientist´ leads to yet another long thread about 'bias' and similar concept is worrisome. The more speech is stifled, the more people have to weigh every word, every expression before they dare to utter it for fear of being accused of violating something, somewhere, making someone feel 'harmed', the less open and welcoming society will be. Less open to new ideas and new concept, less welcoming to those who come forth with those ideas and thoughts.
It also does not mean people will actually change in such a way that they won't think someone 'looks like an engineer' or 'looks live a TV star', they just won't say it out loud. Instead they'll say it among friends they know they can trust, more vehemently than they'd have done if this type of speech were not taboo.
I can only hope that the hyper-sensitivity currently found in the public sphere will pass when enough people from enough parts of society speak up against it. If it doesn't we're in for troubled times as it touches something which lies at the core of the enlightened western society, freedom of speech and expression. Those are precious things, too precious to squander.
At the start of the video they introduced themselves as Lauren Lyons: Flight Reliability Engineer and Michael Hammersley: Materials Engineer. All rocket scientists it seems
I went to school with one of the other hosts. He's legitimately a genius, top marks and well-decorated in academia. Kind of weird to see the guy I used to hang out with livestreaming to 2.3mm people.
You're showing your biases here. The other people on the livestream are also rocket scientists. They aren't PR people. They just happen to be younger, or women, or of color. So you might want to re-evaluate what you think a rocket scientist "looks like", because your notion is outdated.
Sorry to call you out like this, but these kinds of prejudices about who is the "correct" kind of person for tech jobs are harmful and discouraging to the people who don't fit the stereotypes, and helps contribute to keeping them out of the field.
> He doesn't look like a TV star, he looks like an engineer, a rocket scientist. He looks real.
Which is funny because, reading the job titles given to the SpaceX announcers, my first thought is always "wow, SpaceX hires some really attractive engineers."
It makes sense, as publicity is central to SpaceX's / Musk's mission. SpaceX evolved out of Musk's Mars Oasis concept, with the aim being to inspire and reignite interest in space with a greenhouse on Mars.
Should have been written: "Love that SpaceX announces, shoots, and leaves live production in-house." Not because it was grammatically incorrect, but because I wanted just one more chance to make an Oxford comma joke. http://a.co/gc5Izsa
Readit News
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/06/spacex-landed-two-of-its-t...
I've seen the much-touted $90M price-tag for the FH launch, but does that take into account loss of the core or boosters?
That seems to imply they were trying to do a 3-engine landing, which they tested recently in the 'failed to expend the rocket' incident. This might explain why they miscalculated the igniter requirement since they don't have much experience with 3-engine landings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytrrdOPYzA
“Of Course I Still Love You” is the name of a spacecraft in The Culture, a series of novels that inspired Elon Musk when he was young.
https://youtu.be/AGPH_i0ZlyM?t=56
My non tech interested wife was cheering for both boosters to land safely. “What world am I in!?”
Thanks SpaceX for making us excited about space again.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVZ0NPoU0AAMWk6.jpg
I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to understand how you came to the conclusion you did.
Deleted Comment
When I saw that, all I could think about was seeing hundreds of those and that scene being as mundane as a plane landing.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
So, whats to stop them attaching an additional two (or more) to the existing rocket now that they have the basic synchronization worked out.
Deleted Comment
Might be a naive thought, but for a few minutes, you forget everything else. There were millions of people from every nation live-watching the broadcast and everyone was cheering and hoping for the best.
The world seemed at peace during that moment and this is what I love about space exploration and all these great human achievements.
Landing these things will become the standard. mmillion dollar fireworks will not. Anyways, still very impressed.
Perfect takeoff, 2 simultaneous landings (still waiting for confirmation on the droneship landing), the car is in orbit.
I don't remember being so nervous watching a launch video since... Space Shuttle missions, I think.
Great job, SpaceX!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBr2kKAHN6M
e.g. https://i.imgur.com/Yu6gRar.jpg
This is all I'm watching for the rest of the day https://imgur.com/oKWTAQk
Might I suggest pairing it with Pink Floyd's _Echoes_[0]?
- 0 - https://open.spotify.com/album/468ZwCchVtzEbt9BHmXopb
I've had the same running all day, to be honest. Having the 2001 a Space Odyssey soundtrack and Interstellar's soundtrack in the background is quite pleasant.
Deleted Comment
I know where I'm putting my money.
landing of the mars mission was pretty big in the spectacle sense.
That is correct...but NOT in orbit of our home planet!
Do we know the fate of the centre core yet?
I might be reading into something that's not there, but the presenters (I didn't get their names) acted like they received surprising news in thier monitors at 39:03[1] just as they were about to report on the drone ship landing.
Dude: "We've just gotten confirmation..."
Lady: "oh!"
Dude: "Oh"
Lady: "[laughs] We are waiting to hear what happens..."
1. https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=39m5s
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=38m20s
... and then back to the presenters. As someone said to me, "That's their lying face!" :)
Can't fault them for wanting to dwell on the positives though, was an amazing moment to watch.
Edit: You can switch cameras on the above youtube video to the countdown net; you can clearly hear them saying "We lost the centre core" at 38m30s - not sure if that means "lost signal of" or otherwise. The people in the control room appear to become more muted at that point, though they still seem composed. It's really not clear.
Edit: On the countdown net you can hear some minutes later "suspected loss of signal": https://youtu.be/-B_tWbjFIGI?t=42m21s
Doubly so when the "failure" isn't part of the primary mission.
It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.
Just speculation, but it makes sense to me...
Although there hasn't been an official statement by SpaceX yet, and whoever said "we lost the center core" could have just been referring to the video feed from the drone ship.
For those like me unfamiliar with the terminology used in this context, is this wording reserved for situations where the rocket is destroyed or could it also mean they lost contact/video feed with the center core?
We already dig other nice videos on youtube with rocket launches and the like. "How it's made" and so on. Some manufacturing videos have, believe it or not, caught her attention for half an hour! I think it was especially a video from manufacturing the Mini (car), lots of robots and automation.
You can hear "Centre core defect on shutdown". Definitely didn't make it.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I am pretty sure that SpaceX was able to achieve what they did today also because they studied the Soviet N1 rocket and learned from what the engineers at that time had to figure out from scratch.
The other thing is that the N1 Moon rocket was a very different design - a single booster with many small engines, so incredibly difficult system to control, especially given the state of technology 50 years ago. Falcon Heavy is more similar to the successful Energia booster - core + strap on boosters - that was originally designed for the Russian shuttle. Or the Angara series.
Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
I'm pretty sure one can launch space station modules on regular Falcon-9 as well. Russians launch some on Soyuz rocket.
Surely FH is more convenient for big stations.
SpaceX's Falcon project is the first major progress we've made in the field of human spaceflight since the Apollo program.
Deleted Comment
That's nuts.
Also love seeing machinists side by side cheering with software engineers, standing by a mission control which is placed feet from where engines are assembled on the shop floor.
Open company culture well-executed.
Congratulations to all there!
Why in the world would someone agree to be a reference and then bad mouth afterwards? Some folks...
The other hosts are great, but if you told me they were hired actors or PR people I'd believe it.
It also does not mean people will actually change in such a way that they won't think someone 'looks like an engineer' or 'looks live a TV star', they just won't say it out loud. Instead they'll say it among friends they know they can trust, more vehemently than they'd have done if this type of speech were not taboo.
I can only hope that the hyper-sensitivity currently found in the public sphere will pass when enough people from enough parts of society speak up against it. If it doesn't we're in for troubled times as it touches something which lies at the core of the enlightened western society, freedom of speech and expression. Those are precious things, too precious to squander.
Because they are young and good looking and good at public speaking?
Sorry to call you out like this, but these kinds of prejudices about who is the "correct" kind of person for tech jobs are harmful and discouraging to the people who don't fit the stereotypes, and helps contribute to keeping them out of the field.
EDIT: Of course she's also involved in FIRST :P
Which is funny because, reading the job titles given to the SpaceX announcers, my first thought is always "wow, SpaceX hires some really attractive engineers."
Dead Comment