SpaceX Falcon 9 debris from failed CRS-7 launch found in sea off Scilly | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Falcon 9 debris from failed CRS-7 launch found in sea off Scilly

bbc.co.uk

92 pointsjackgavigan45 comments

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It's actually CRS-4 (which launched in September 2014), not CRS-7.

See the /r/spacex investigation thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falco...

People at /r/spacex claim it might be actually not CRS-7 debris, but from some earlier flight

Here is a link to a thread discussing the origins: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3ug55w/scilly_falco...

I thought it was Sicily and that Scilly was a keystroke mistake. Funny that...

Before reading your comment I still thought it said Sicily. My brain just assumed that was what it said

It doesn't help that Scilly isn't usually used in isolation. Usually the group is referred to as the Isles of Scilly or the Scilly Isles. None of the islands is actually called Scilly.

But the residents apparently prefer the Isles of Scilly to the Scilly Isles.

Now that's just some Scilly nitpicking.

..I'll let myself out.

I presume few people outside Britain know how "Scilly" is pronounced, so for their benefit: like "silly".

(I've heard "Scilly Isles" far more often than "Isles of Scilly", but I'm nowhere near local.)

Perhaps they need a government tourism office that focuses on advertising the many wonderful hiking opportunities on the islands.

A Ministry of Scilly Walks.

I've never really heard of it being called the Scilly Isles. Only the Isles of Scilly.

Not many people even in the UK know it exists though (I only do because my ex girlfriend grew up there)

I imagine more people in the UK know they exist than you perceive. Anyone who still watches the weather updates on the TV or listens to them on the radio instead of getting it from their phone will have heard mention of the...

Though... the more time goes on, the more I expect to hear "oh, they still broadcast the weather on TV? I thought they just did that during the war"... and by war, they're referring to the Gulf war... along with "Walkman/Discman? What's that?"

There are people in the UK who don't know the Scilly Isles exist!?

They are also sometimes called 'the last piece of England', reflecting both their westerly position and the fact they are a place where some aspects of time have stood still.

The boat that takes tourists there is called 'The Scillonian'.

Me too. And I wondered how it wound up getting through the straights of Gibralter

Had a somewhat similar thought, stopped for a second wondering how they'd got the authorisation to launch rockets over the mediterranean sea as that seems somewhat unsafe.

Ah! I was in full cognitive dissonance, like how did that stuff get into the strait of Gibraltar, why does the fisherman have an English name etc.

Well, I have an explanation that doesn't involve aliens: I didn't read the name of the island correctly. Good job from the conspiracy to hide itself very well, but next time I'll catch you anyways.

I would have assumed that you could calculate the approximate landing area of at least the larger debris and that there would be some legislation forcing you to at least try to locate/clean it up.

I suppose it doesn't present that much of a threat to anyone (once it has landed).

Most expendable launchers are just dropped into the ocean anyway. SpaceX is the only company that has plans to completely recover the first stage.

I can also assure you that they did do everything they could to locate and recover the debris from this launch. But for some altruistic environmental concern though ... They wanted every piece they could find so they could figure out what happened.

EDIT: Based on analysis from /r/spacex, this is from CRS-4 (not CRS-7), which successfully boosted its second stage, then performed a retropropulsion to test rentry (it didn't have landing legs, so a barge landing couldn't be attempted). I suspect SpaceX still tried to recover as much as they could of the stage, in order to see how well it handled the rentry.

Don't you mean: But NOT for some altruistic ...

Indeed I do, thanks (the danger of typing on mobile... linebreaks are common and proofreading is hard).

Blue Origin just demonstrated a recoverable rocket. But their ambition is just suborbital which only needs 1/8th the power or orbital flight.

I believe Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are both planning for reusable orbital launchers. They're pretty far out from flying, though. I think SpaceX is the only one actually putting stuff into orbit with concrete plans for reusability.

Yeah, by "launcher" I meant "rockets that can put things into orbit".

New Shepard is cool and all, but it's not really in the same weight class as "real" launchers.

https://i.imgur.com/g2VIKVC.jpg

Theoretically, sure, but practically the amount of turbulence experienced by a supersonic rocket (all of them, except those that blow up in the first 10-30 seconds after lift off) is just insane. Any sort of errors that you would have in the calculation describing the initial explosion (already largely unknown because it's an uncharacterized/unstudied catastrophic failure) would only compound over and over again for minutes until they hit the earth. Most rocket pieces are very dense, like all of the high pressure & cold temperature fuel storage and distribution, and those that don't vaporize tend to have a very high terminal velocity, some even supersonic themselves, adding more turbulence to the calculation. Most catastrophic failures also happen with a decent amount of propellant so there's now a low pressure (less than 1 atm) explosion fueled by literally tons of volatile high pressure liquid which creates even more uncertainty. Oh and hey, since the rocket carries all of its own oxidizer, the explosion usually isn't limited by the availability of atmospheric oxygen.

Simply put, every step in this chain of events is mind bogglingly chaotic and nondeterministic. You can create boundaries for how far the pieces could have possibly traveled using assumptions based on the laws of physics, but even at an altitude of 10km, perfect GPS pre-failure, and subsonic speeds we're talking about an area tens of kilometers in radius before you account for ocean currents that quickly expands to an area that is hundreds of kilometers in radius. All of this happens before the first search ship is even in the area (fastest boat is about 100km/h and that's a racing yacht incapable of search and recovery). This truly is an intractable problem until we have radar covering every cubic kilometer of the earth, and even then it'll still be really difficult.

Tangentially related, but if anyone wants to follow a very funny Facebook page, they could do a lot worse than add the one for the Isles of Scilly Police: https://www.facebook.com/IslesofScillyPolice/

wow, barnacles are crazy efficient, I wouldn't expect the section to be covered in them so much already.

Are those barnacles? Looks like mussels to me (Mytilidae).

the person in the video says they are "goose barnacles", which from afar kinda look like mussels[0]. I might have heard wrong though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_barnacle

You're right and I'm wrong. Thanks!

It's interesting that it took less time to find a 10m by 4m piece of debris from a failed space launch that took place on the opposite side of the planet than to find an entire missing airliner with a last known GPS coordinates...

This isn't from a failed launch. This is from CRS-4, about 18 months ago.

Are you implying that there's some sort of conspiracy and that global tidal currents are somehow in on it?

If you're talking about MH370, pieces of the aircraft are washing up and getting found on various islands in the western part of the Indian Ocean. It just takes time because (presumably) the currents aren't as favourable to make parts of the plane wash up as in the North Atlantic.

Incidentally, large parts of the aircraft - including the fuselage itself - may have sunk already, which was the case with AF447 a few years ago.

I'm guessing SpaceX will want to recover this so they can inspect it to see if they can learn anything useful.

Its weird really, I can't do much these days without someone tracking me and using that information to target me with ads and yet whole commercial airliners and chunks of space rockets can vanish only to wash up on beaches covered in barnacles...

Even whole planes full of people can vanish.

How are these things related?

I'm sure if all these chunks of rockets were constantly connected to the internet we could track them too...

Sometimes the timing of unconnected events is curious on a cosmic scale.

Only a day or two ago New Shepherd reached a milestone. Today parts from a past SpaceX mission wash up onshore.

The proximity of these events show that space exploration is witnessing a lot of activity from agents who are operating independently.

Correlation != causation. Only recently has mass media decided to push tech billionaire's pet projects as "space news", that's is all this shows. There are dozens of other arguably more significant space projects flying under the mass media's radar.

Which projects? Would love to know.

Me too. I can't think of anything going on in space flight right now more significant than SpaceX's reusability efforts

SpaceX's reusabulity efforts are just another incremental improvement to existing rocket technology. Reusable launch vehicles are nothing new. If they can get launch costs down to $60m with their reusable technology that would be great! However, they still can't launch anything >5000kg so it's a pretty mixed bag and a lot of good marketing.

Reusable launch vehicles are nothing new? I can think of only one other, and it ended up being unbelievably expensive, costing far more than an equivalent expendable launcher.

SpaceX's launch cost is already about $60 million in expendable mode, so your comment about bringing it "down to $60 with their reusable technology" makes no sense to me. If they pull it off, the cost might drop to more like $10-30 million.

A rocket that costs like an expendable launcher but can be reused will be a massive game changer, not "just another incremental improvement." Maybe all the changes needed to get to that point are incremental, but that doesn't mean the result won't be huge.

Pick one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_...

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