SpaceX Jason-3 Live Webcast

They are saying over at r/spacex that it crashed on landing

I wonder if it exploded this time, last time they didn't stay upright the remaining fuel ignited and it blew up.

What is the reason they cut the stream for events like this? Just so they can shift focus by writing a press release saying how they could salvage the most important stuff before the video hits the news?

There's a crucial bit of ambiguity there- when they say "on-target," do they mean that the rocket is now sitting on the barge with a broken leg, or did it bounce off and explode like on the previous attempts?

After watching the Florida landing a number of times, and taking into account that this maneuver is made more difficult by the fact that at its lowest thrust setting just one engine has more thrust than the booster weighs, trying to reach 0,0 velocity at a point and time, where the point is moving (the platform is rising and sinking in the swells) is likely not possible.

As I understand it, deep sea oil drilling platforms provide stability by using a very large "keel" under the platform with air pumps to keep the overall displacement relatively constant so that the platform's position relative to the drill is maintained (the drill being in the sea bed). The SeaLaunch vehicle that Boeing built has similar sorts of compensation strategies.

And that is a problem in that if you have to recover to land, you limit the missions where you can recover and that will impact the bonus of recoverable stages.

One wonders if there is some way to adapt a technique the Navy uses for landing helicopters in rough seas, where the helicopter "hooks" the deck and then applies a net positive collective to hold that line under tension, then the line is winched in bringing the helicopter down to the deck. Meanwhile the helicopter has matched the pitching of the deck because it is pulling against the tether at that point. A very complex system and I cannot fathom the challenge of building something like that on an autonomous landing barge.

Fuel.

Edit: to elaborate, you can burn more fuel on the first stage, with all the advantages that implies, if you have a place to land down range as opposed to having to turn around and fly back. Sometimes the way to get that place to land might be to put it there.

Depending on the target orbit, it is often simply not possible to propel the first stage back to dry land. Today's Vandenberg launch into polar orbit was just that.

They need it for falcon heavy central core, and also for certain launches where they don't have enough deltav to return to landing site. Land is preferable of course.

The benefit of landing on the barge is that the barge can be located way downrange. This means the rocket can fly to it more directly, rather than making a U turn and flying back where it came from. That in turn means the rocket needs less fuel for landing maneuvers and can use more fuel for putting stuff into space. For some missions, the rocket won't have enough fuel to get the payload to orbit and return to the launch site for landing. The barge will allow first stage recovery for these missions.

As far as I understand this, the landing location depends on the launch site and mission profile - i.e. they can't always boost back to the pad with the remaining fuel stage 1 has.

Given that, then even if they'd decide to eventually launch every mission so that first stage can land on the ground, the current situation was that they could either waste the booster or try and land on water. So the question is - why shouldn't they try?

In this particular case the launch was from Vandenberg in California and they do not yet have permit clearances to land the first stage back on land here. However, as others have said the barge is key for other reasons too.

There are two YouTube links, from the SpaceX page:

SpaceX webcast will go live here and on YouTube at about 1:15pm ET/10:15am PT. For our full hosted webcast, use this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivdKRJzl6y0 For views of rocket, launch countdown audio and telemetry info, use this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz_lclGXNg

I'm thinking there may have been a video delay and it locked up because the landing might not have gone well. i.e. Taken out the video hardware. Just a guess... hoping to be wrong.

Every extra part is extra weight, needing extra fuel, which in turn needs extra-extra-fuel because of the weight of that new fuel, and so on. There is very little redundancy on a rocket.

It's unknown what exactly 'not upright' means just yet.

I'm assuming that means it's in 10,000 pieces scattered across the Pacific. I'd be shocked if it didn't topple over, and once it goes over it's blowing up.

> 'emergency' backup legs to address this kind of event?

For the extra weight and complexity a second set of legs would add, I'd expect they'd shore up the primary legs instead, unless they were already at the threshold of being too heavy.

Did you mean the landing will happen after ~40 mins?

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind can't stay in the cradle forever.

This is u: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c6/22/62/c6226219c...

The point is that you, the taxpayer, even if you don't care about space, has to spend less of your cash than the comparable ways of putting stuff up. Quite a lot less.

Reporter: “Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?”

Commander Sinclair: “No. We have to stay here. And there’s a simple reason why: Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers. But there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us, it’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto¹, and Buddy Holly and Aristophanes, and all of this… and all of this was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.”

— Babylon 5, Season 1 Episode 4, Infection (1994)

① Fictional

You just got an important earth science satellite placed in orbit for much less money than it would have cost purchasing that service from elsewhere.